2009/02/16

How does your teacher think like?

Learning and teaching are two correlated processes which cannot be sundered. It is difficult to learn without help of an experienced tutor; and similarly, it is impossible to teach without an eager response on a pupil´s side. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) suggests that I am a personality with quite moderate extraversion and intuition, while my thinking and judging preferences are only slight. The extraversion spectrum caught my attention the most and so the extraverted versus the introverted learning and teaching-styles will be topics of my discussion.

I agree with my MBTI results to a certain extent because I consider myself being a highly adaptive student in all aspects. Yes, I am an extravert but I can also be an introvert. Personally, I have had no problems with any of the teaching styles I have experienced so far. Therefore, I have no single favourite teacher. However, there are a few teaching practices which really caught my attention. In order to achieve more objective comparison, I decided to recall some examples from the same area of studies and the same period of time. I was a math high school student and we were learning calculus.

The first teacher called Alex was a great example of an extraverted person. She liked to talk quite a lot and she favoured an active discussion in our class. Her lectures on ‘the integration using areas under graphs’ were very vivid. Alex used great visual depiction and verbally described each step of her cognitive thinking. I am mostly an extroverted person too, thus I could easily identify myself with her teaching style. I could get her point so easily that, sometimes, I had a problem keeping my ideas to myself. I feel sorry now that I revealed a small number of answers for the most difficult tasks even before the introverted part of our class could digest the questions.

On the other hand, a friend of mine called Mike had a really tough time in the class. Although he was an outstanding math student, he just needed a different teaching approach. I got a chance to tutor him after classes and I noticed that he preferred one-to-one lectures. The possibility of pacing his learning process led to more significant concentration on a topic. Mike was clearly an introverted learner. Furthermore, if Mike felt it was necessary to nail down basic concepts such as ‘the graphical meaning of a derivate’ (i.e. the tangent to a slope), he waited until we met in private. Yet when being in the same situation, I usually reacted in a totally different way. I spoke my concerns in the class aloud, tried to get Alex´s response and hopefully confirmed my ideas. Doing so, I left with complete understanding.

When our math class changed teachers during the mid-term period, I felt quite uncomfortable at first. Our new teacher, Bart, was an opposite of Alex. Bart liked to have strict discipline in the class and he preferred explaining lectures without an active participation of students. He made occasional breaks during which we could individually read proofs, e.g. ‘the proofs of standard integrals’. Then he gave us a chance to ask him about unclear parts which he later explained into sufficient depth. Originally, the room for own comprehension of a subject´s matter was inconvenient to me. But later I understood Bart´s logical practice and I started to enjoy every class with him.

My initially extraverted learning style changed into more introverted because of Bart´s introverted teaching influence. And I stayed open-minded: I brought back my strengths of extraversion into practice outside the class. Harvard´s professor Richard J. Light mentions in his extensive research ´Making the Most of College´: “The design of homework really matters.” And I agree; Alex used to give us group homework and I appreciated discussing it publicly. I was engaged. But unlike Alex, Bart used to give us a bunch of handouts and formulas to go through. Since I never was a singleton type of a learner, I eventually managed to form a study group with other students with the same need of sharing ideas out loud. We could cooperate in order to improve our overall performance.

On the other hand, Mike did not benefit from Alex´s kind of homework at all. Mike felt left out in such study groups; yet he felt like a fish in the water when Bart gave us readings about ‘the integration by parts’. Mike clearly benefited from the mainly introverted teaching-style. Having thought about the progress I achieved, I believe that Mike could have gained from Alex´s original group assignments too. Mike had a need of doing things apart.  If he had done an initial research beforehand, he could utilize his introverted learning preference on his own. He could have been easily prepared for outside-class discussions afterwards.

I consider myself being an enthusiastic student with the extraverted learning preference. Therefore, there are definitely teaching methods which suit me more than other ones. However, I believe that the distinct MBTI´s generalization does not apply to me specifically. Yes, I do like studying actively in groups, but I also like the occasional challenge of intensive readings and personal research. I did not mind listening to Bart´s lectures and developing my own understanding of the subject´s nature. Then also, I was very happy to discuss the meaning of the volume of a revolution on a graph with my eager friends.

Frankly, I am glad that I was able to keep up with both math teachers of mine. The fact that I endured learning in both the highly extroverted and the highly introverted teaching-style classes puts me at a huge advantage before other freshmen college students. It is important to keep on mind that the appropriate adaptation to different environments is the most valued skill these days. Similarly, I believe that teachers should depolarize their teaching methods and try to find an appropriate balance so that all students are satisfied. They should try to diversify their teaching-styles for in-class and outside-class work. Alternatively, an initiation of passionate study groups helps to balance out either type of learners.

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1 Please note that, throughout the whole discursive essay, I changed names and possibly also genders of my characters in order to maintain their full level anonymity.

2 Light R. J.: Making the Most of College. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001 (ISBN: 0-647-00478-7). p.52