Personal instructional style preferences and application

Personal Instructional Style

According to the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I am classified as a "provider," or an ESFJ (Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Judging) personality. I think this personality type makes me ideally qualified to lead a classroom in the future. With the increasing need to prepare students for team-based activities in the workforce, and to cope with new technology, collaborative and sensory experiences must be at the heart of the academic experience. I see myself constantly integrating hands-on activities into my classroom work and homework assignments. For example, instead of merely teaching the facts about the events that inspired the first Thanksgiving, I see myself having a class discussion with the students about the ways the Indians and Pilgrims may have felt about the land, and reconstructing the meal as a final, collaborative activity where students play the different roles of different participants. Webquests and using technology to encourage student research, discovery, and creative learning in collaboration with others will also feature prominently in my classroom. I thrive on change, children thrive on change, and constant change is what will characterize our nation in the future.

As an extrovert, I will take a lively interest in all of my student's personalities and social activities. I see myself remembering all of my student's names at the end of the first day of school, and remembering their birthdays and other significant facts about students' lives. My belief that all of the senses are important in classroom activities will make my learning activities engaging to my student's thirst for novelty. I intend to use all of my own and my student's multiple intelligences in creating memorable experiences that integrate singing, artistic works, and storytelling into academic learning. Even in math, learning the multiplication tables as a jingle can rouse the enthusiasm of the most math-phobic child, and science should be tactile, to excite young minds about the experimental aspects of the discipline. Students are natural scientists, after all, always asking 'why?' The classroom should be full of charts and artwork that reinforce the current lesson plan and students will be encouraged to contribute to that environment, with their own projects. The classroom with likely be culturally diverse, and students will be encouraged to bring their cultural experiences from the home into the learning environment.

My orientation towards feeling is important, because gaining an empathetic rapport with students when they experience personal and academic struggles is essential, so they do not blame themselves, or their teacher, or the subject itself. Judging in a fair manner, however, is also important to me, and I will not be so eccentric in my assignments to fail to use more standardized forms of assessment to drill students in basic skills and areas of knowledge. Students must have a sense of mastery of, for example, basic grammar, even if these principles are reinforced with fun assignments like writing a letter to their pet.

Understanding, I believe is best realized through activity and sorting out problems in open-ended assignments as well as drills. Creating challenging activities where students were filled with a constant sense of discovery is essential so that the children 'own' the skills they have learned, rather than merely mimic what a teacher says. To me, synthesis, or creating something anew, is the highest pinnacle of learning, and every year should be different for the teacher as well as the student, as the teacher grapples with new personalities, and new ideas from the students about how to convey required material in an effective manner.