Arbitrary Marks

I’m in the midst of teaching an intro to philosophy course and taking two classes in how to teach online. They’re all being administered online, either through Blackboard (the one I’m teaching) or Moodle (the ones I’m taking). As part of the class in “Online Learning”, I’m evaluating an award-winning online course. Oddly enough, the course I’m evaluating is…a course in online learning.

(Note - we really need some better synonyms for “online” to avoid repetitiveness!)

Anyway, I ran across this link to a teaching styles inventory during my evaluation. I took it and got the following results:

Score | Style | Range
5.8 | Formal Authority | High
5.0 | Delegator | High
4.6 | Facilitator | Moderate
4.5 | Expert | Moderate
3.8 | Personal Model | Low

I’d be curious to see how my scores/style changes over time, within different classes, etc. Frustratingly, the link had little information about each “style”, although some Googling brought me to a document–in Comic Sans!–explaining the inventory a little more.

Below the fold is an explanation of the Grasha inventory categories, for the curious.

• The Formal Authority is concerned with providing feedback, goals, expectations, and rules of conduct.
• The Delegator is a resource for autonomous student teams working on projects.
• The Facilitator’s goal is to develop independence, initiative, and responsibility in students.
• The Expert is concerned with transmitting information and insuring that students learn this material.
• The Personal Model establishes a model for how to think and behave.

I think that each “model” is going to be appropriate at different times in a class–compare the start of a unit to once students have basic concepts and are learning to work critically with them. As well, the “personal model” is useful when trying to show students how to interact with ideas respectfully, but in an intro level course there may not be a lot of room for that, as the focus will be getting students to understand philosophical topics in general.

I’m a little wary of neat categories like these, but I think they can be helpful with some grains of salt.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Email me at arbitrary [dot] marks [at] gmail [dot] com if you think a discussion should be re-opened.