Teaching Profile

This inventory was designed to gauge teaching preferences and styles. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. Below, there are twelve items, each of which contains four statements about ways you might respond in your teaching, through the way you might behave, think, or feel.

Please rank the statement that best describes your response with a “4”and the least descriptive statement with a “1”. The rankings should be recorded in the space next to the statement.

When I teach my class, I would be most likely to:

1.

___A. Include student’s life experiences or preexisting knowledge when I introduce a concept.

___B. Incorporate reading assignments that provide the background for each concept introduced.

___C. Require students to learn by doing creative problem solving exercises, laboratory activities, and projects.

___D. Engage students in problems that are outside the realm of possibility to force them to think

creatively.

2.

___A. Suggest that students collaborate together on their assignments rather than compete.

___B. Instill the relevant facts and procedures. When students cannot pass the state exam or do not

have the prerequisite knowledge from my class in the next one they take, I have truly failed as a

teacher.

___C. Assign a wide variety of tasks that facilitate learning for understanding. Sometimes learning for understanding takes longer than the administration would like, or longer than I originally planned.

___D. Cultivate scholarship and independent thinking/reasoning skills by providing optional

assignments that can be done outside of class.

3.

___A. Tie concepts to applications in the real world.

___B. Institute a regularly scheduled time for skill building where students practice their use of

problem solving.

___C. Guide students in their desire to invent new methods for solving problems and/or representing

data.

___D. Introduce students to the possibility that for some problems there is no “right answer”.

4.

___A. Challenge students to reevaluate their own understanding by valuing the opinions of other

students.

___B. Supply students with the structure they need to recall and repeat the appropriate facts and

procedures from memory to pass the end-of-unit or end-of-semester test.

___C. Capitalize on student curiosity about unfamiliar situations.

___D. Specify a certain amount of time in class for homework.

5.

___A. Become concerned if I feel as though students are asking the question “Why do I have to learn

this?”

___B. Insist that students follow my lecture, and frequently question them during the lecture as a check of where I am. I may require that they take notes throughout.

___C. Supply time for exploration and discovery where students have the opportunity to answer their

“what if” questions.

___D. Allow students to develop their own problem solution process.

6.

___A. Illuminate students’ misunderstandings by having them describe their thought processes and

explain their ideas.

___B. Provide a relatively complete content structure for students to memorize so that they can build

upon this foundational knowledge later.

___C. Present scenarios involving many concepts that provide material for class discussion about

solutions and predictions.

___D. Devote time to skill drills where each student works alone to deepen their understanding of a

concept.