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day 6 was a discussion of Teaching Perspectives that came out of my ACRL Intentional Teacher Immersion program from San Diego last summer. I began by discussing the two books on teaching that we had used in that program: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield and The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. I briefly reviewed the main points of these two books. Palmer’s book focuses on the connection we make with our students rather than good teaching ‘technique.’ Brookfield’s book looks at teaching through four lenses: our autobiographies, our students eye’s, our colleagues’ experiences and theorhetical literature. I have both of these in my office if anyone is looking to read them.

Next the class looked at the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (http://teachingperspectives.com/ ) As we had all taken the inventory – we posted our placement on the continuum on the board. The five measures of the TPI are

• Transmission: Effective teaching requires a substatial commitment to the content or subject matter
• Apprenticeship: Effective teaching is a process of socializing students into new behavioral normas and ways of working. (Kolb)
• Developmental: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted ‘from the learners point of view’ (Vygotsky)
• Nurturing: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart not the head (Albert Bandura is a researcher here)
• Social Reform: Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways.

Once again we fell all along the continuums of these five factors but an interesting discussion ensued on ways our perspectives inform our teaching and our students learning.