Week 5 Reflections

My TPI results reflect the way in which I realisitcally know that I teach, but not necessarily how I wish to teach.  As an Advanced Placement teacher nearly everything I do in my class revolves around preparing students for the AP test.  I believe that if I didn't teach the class in a way that best prepares students for the test, then I would doing them a disservice.  Students enroll in the class with the intention of taking an AP class that culminates in the AP test.  Consequently, most of what I do on a daily basis involves the transmission of knowledge as my TPI scores reflect.

However, philosophically I am very interested in equipping students with the skills they need to evaluate the world around them like a social scienctist would.  I want to instill in students the skills that they need to think for themselves.  I do try to acknowledge and work within each student's developmental zone--hence my higher score in the apprenticeship category.  Yet, I would like students to use these skills to greater social ends.  Thus, I was shocked at that social reform was my lowest scoring category.  It raised my awareness about how far I have drifted from my intial beliefs about education. 

For online teachers, I would suspect that their transmission and maybe their developmental scores would be higher when they reflected on their online teaching.  It seems to me that online teaching would be more centered on student mastery of the content and their increasing ability to apply the content.  I also think that the nurturing component of the teacher's survey would decrease.  Perhaps this is just me, but I think it would be much easier to disregard the feelings or emotional progress of a student who one never has to see in person.  I think that this behavior almost always be unconscious, so perhaps by bringing it into one's consciousnes, it could be combatted.