Author: tpi_admin

A number of years ago, I attended a 3-day workshop on teaching in the health professions. We learned how to write behavioral objectives, sequence content, give lectures, conduct discussions, write different levels of questions, and plan for assessment of learning. The instructors were enthusiastic and well prepared.  Clearly, this program had been delivered many times before, across the United States and Canada. Yet, something seemed missing.

Not once were we asked what effective teaching might look like in the context of our work. Instead, we were given a set of skills that were assumed to be necessary and sufficient across disciplines, contexts, learners, and professional cultures.

This workshop had two implicit messages: First, effective teaching was based on a pre-defined skill set; and second, it didn’t matter what, where or whom you were teaching — the essential skill set was the same. In three days, with multiple health professions, this workshop had reduced teaching to a generic set of skills to be mastered and applied anywhere with all learners.

From this point of view, teaching is a neutral, skilled performance that involves setting objectives, giving lectures (short or long), asking questions, leading discussions, providing feedback and assessing learning. Difference in learners (e.g., novices vs. advanced), content (e.g., basic sciences vs. social sciences), context (e.g., classrooms vs. clinical settings), and professional cultures (e.g., medicine vs. engineering) were absent in this view. Effectiveness was equated with skilled performance: the more skilled the performance, the better the teaching.

Skilled performance is only part of effective teaching. Every time teachers use a technique, they do so with motive, an intent to accomplish something based on particular beliefs about learning and the role of a teacher. Their intentions and beliefs shape the way they enact any ‘skilled performance’. Without knowing the alignment between a teacher’s actions, intentions, and beliefs, it’s difficult to judge the quality of teaching.

We’ve all seen a variety of ‘good’ teachers. Some were passionate about their subject and that passion was contagious. Others challenged us to think differently, to examine our assumptions about life or about a subject. Still others guided us with their questions and quiet manner. Some of those have become our role models. They lived what they taught and taught what they lived. Their teaching represented an alignment between intentions and beliefs that, in turn, made their teaching actions effective and memorable.

The teaching workshop described at the beginning illustrates a singular and dominant view of teaching, characterized by generic skills and devoid of variation across contexts, disciplines, learners, beliefs, and commitments. This conception of teaching ignores much of what is essential to good teaching. But equally important, such a reduction bends toward an untenable assumption – that there is an orthodoxy of the good in teaching that applies across variations in context, subject, learners, and individual teachers. One size does not fit all in the cloak room of good teaching.

More available at:

Pratt, D. D. (2002). Good teaching: one size fits all? In An Up-date on Teaching Theory, Jovita Ross-Gordon (Ed.), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers.

Why take the TPI?
The TPI is taken for many reasons. In this first blog, I’d like to discuss two common reasons for taking the TPI: First, to articulate your approach or philosophy of teaching;  and second, to facilitate conversations across different philosophies of teaching.

Let’s look more closely at the first one: To articulate your approach or philosophy of teaching. Sometimes we are expected to explain our approach to teaching. It can be as simple as explaining to learners why we do certain things when teaching or supervising them. It might be as important as explaining to evaluators of our teaching why we do what we do. Or it might be to draft a teaching philosophy statement as part of reflecting on our teaching. In each case, we want to be clear about the motives and justifications behind our actions — what we are trying to accomplish, how we do that and, sometimes, the rationale for teaching the way we do. The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) can give people insight into their teaching and language to explain it to others.

In the case of evaluators of teaching, this can be critical, especially if their orientation to teaching is markedly different from the teacher being evaluated. Colleagues come to the task of evaluating teaching with conscious and unconscious biases based on what they believe about effective teaching. This can be negligible; but it can also be profound. I’ve often heard people say that one or another perspective on teaching is not a legitimate form of teaching (e.g., Social Reform) or that a particular view of teaching is no longer acceptable where they teach (e.g., Transmission). This tendency to dismiss particular forms of teaching does an injustice to some of our most memorable teachers. The TPI can help people explain and justify their orientation to teaching.

This brings me to the second reason for taking the TPI – to facilitate conversations across different orientations to teaching. When colleagues team teach or meet to review or discuss curriculum changes, offer help to junior faculty, or even when hiring new faculty, they need a language and framework that articulates and values pedagogical differences. The TPI can make for a more inclusive conversation about teaching that affords voice and place to those that are ‘different’.

This is also important when working with colleagues that have ways of thinking about teaching and learning that are different from the norm in their community of practice. As of November 2019, more than 300,000 people have taken the TPI. Our data show similar teaching profiles for specific disciplines and professions. For example, teachers of the basic sciences have a similar profile, as do teachers of math, social sciences, humanities, education, emergency medicine, paediatrics, surgery and nursing. In other words, as Lee Shulman has said, each profession or discipline has a ‘signature pedagogy’ that is common across teachers within their community of practice.

While there are similarities within each subject, discipline or health profession there are also ‘outliers’, that is, people that don’t fit the signature profile for their specialty. That doesn’t mean they are ineffective; quite the opposite. These outliers can be innovators, often helping learners challenge the status quo. However, as outliers, they can be silenced, dismissed or ‘othered’ by having a different approach to teaching.

More information about why people take the TPI can be found in the 2016 edition of ‘Five Perspectives on Teaching: Mapping a plurality of the good’ published by Krieger. (Pratt, Smulders & Associates)