Professionalizing college instruction: IHE article

[marshwiggle]

I've taken the Meyers-Briggs before (and gotten a rather odd score on it), but have never worked for an employer that made us take any of these tests.  It must be strange to have to take something like that as part of your work.

The problem with almost all of these things only arises when they get used prescriptively, rather than for descriptive convenience. For instance, I find Myers-Briggs often convenient as a shorthand to describe certain kinds of personalities, but obviously any individual is complex enough that any sort of categorization has limited utility by itself.

[Hibush]

Ha!  Funny you Meyers-Briggs--my mind went there in the same breath with "learning styles" (sorry for the screwy metaphor). 

The first day was the MBI, which we proceeded to live and die with for the following days in every session ("So, you're an INTJ, which means you have to do thus and so....."). 

We did this also, but somewhat more sensibly. When you find out that your department is >60% INTJ, which otherwise comprises something like 3% of the population, there are certain practical consequences around what is considered normal responses. Rewarding the faculty with a karaoke party is not going to build cohesion and loyalty. The faculty's comfort with uncertainty is not shared by the staff. So giving the non-INTJ staff an information lifeline now and then really helps. Depending on them to finish what the faculty start is a good idea.

[Puget]

Ha!  Funny you Meyers-Briggs--my mind went there in the same breath with "learning styles" (sorry for the screwy metaphor). 

The first day was the MBI, which we proceeded to live and die with for the following days in every session ("So, you're an INTJ, which means you have to do thus and so....."). 

We did this also, but somewhat more sensibly. When you find out that your department is >60% INTJ, which otherwise comprises something like 3% of the population, there are certain practical consequences around what is considered normal responses. Rewarding the faculty with a karaoke party is not going to build cohesion and loyalty. The faculty's comfort with uncertainty is not shared by the staff. So giving the non-INTJ staff an information lifeline now and then really helps. Depending on them to finish what the faculty start is a good idea.

Umm, you do realize Meyers-Briggs has no scientific validity? The story of how it was developed by a completely untrained mother-daughter pair, and how it took off, is quite interesting from a sociological perspective. But it is in no way a valid personality test. There is no "more sensibly" when it comes to it.

[OneMoreYear]

Ha!  Funny you Meyers-Briggs--my mind went there in the same breath with "learning styles" (sorry for the screwy metaphor). 

The first day was the MBI, which we proceeded to live and die with for the following days in every session ("So, you're an INTJ, which means you have to do thus and so....."). 

We did this also, but somewhat more sensibly. When you find out that your department is >60% INTJ, which otherwise comprises something like 3% of the population, there are certain practical consequences around what is considered normal responses. Rewarding the faculty with a karaoke party is not going to build cohesion and loyalty. The faculty's comfort with uncertainty is not shared by the staff. So giving the non-INTJ staff an information lifeline now and then really helps. Depending on them to finish what the faculty start is a good idea.

Umm, you do realize Meyers-Briggs has no scientific validity? The story of how it was developed by a completely untrained mother-daughter pair, and how it took off, is quite interesting from a sociological perspective. But it is in no way a valid personality test. There is no "more sensibly" when it comes to it.

The Myers-Briggs is an excellent example of pseudoscience that just won't die. It's not reliable or valid, but it's so entrenched in the lexicon that companies shell out money for this paragon of meaninglessness. I suppose it does have usefulness as a part of my pseudoscience lecture (a good number of my students every year know their MB type).

[dismalist]

After reading about Myers-Briggs upthread, I took a no cost online version. The results marked me as an admirable personality type. The test is wrong. :-)

[marshwiggle]

Ha!  Funny you Meyers-Briggs--my mind went there in the same breath with "learning styles" (sorry for the screwy metaphor). 

The first day was the MBI, which we proceeded to live and die with for the following days in every session ("So, you're an INTJ, which means you have to do thus and so....."). 

We did this also, but somewhat more sensibly. When you find out that your department is >60% INTJ, which otherwise comprises something like 3% of the population, there are certain practical consequences around what is considered normal responses. Rewarding the faculty with a karaoke party is not going to build cohesion and loyalty. The faculty's comfort with uncertainty is not shared by the staff. So giving the non-INTJ staff an information lifeline now and then really helps. Depending on them to finish what the faculty start is a good idea.

Umm, you do realize Meyers-Briggs has no scientific validity? The story of how it was developed by a completely untrained mother-daughter pair, and how it took off, is quite interesting from a sociological perspective. But it is in no way a valid personality test. There is no "more sensibly" when it comes to it.

The Myers-Briggs is an excellent example of pseudoscience that just won't die. It's not reliable or valid, but it's so entrenched in the lexicon that companies shell out money for this paragon of meaninglessness. I suppose it does have usefulness as a part of my pseudoscience lecture (a good number of my students every year know their MB type).

From
Source: Journal of Best Practices in Health Professions Diversity , Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring
2017), pp. 1-27:

This comprehensive literature
search identified 221 potential studies, of which seven met our inclusion criteria. Four of the
studies examined construct validity, but their varying methods did not permit pooling for
meta-analysis. These studies agree that the instrument has reasonable construct validity. The
three studies of test-retest reliability did allow a meta-analysis to be performed, albeit with caution due to substantial heterogeneity. Results indicate that the Extravert-Introvert, SensingIntuition, and Judging-Perceiving Subscales have satisfactory reliabilities of .75 or higher and
that the Thinking-Feeling subscale has a reliability of .61. The majority of studies were conducted on college-age students; thus, the evidence to support the tool's utility applies more
to this group, and careful thought should be given when applying it to other individuals.

And the 5 factor personality categorization, which is considered more reliable, still includes Extraversion as one of its dimensions.  Claiming it has no validity or reliability is  unsupported by the evidence. (The last statement in the quotation above is worth noting; since most studies were done on a particular demographic, extrapolating beyond that group may produce different results. Again, restricting the range of its applicability isn't the same as saying it's useless.)

[Stockmann]

My experience with pedagogical training is that they're kind of the equivalent of the joke about the physicist assuming a spherical, frictionless cow: they're probably great ideas in a parallel-universe scenario. There is an implicit assumption that you have parallel-universe students that are highly motivated as well as able and willing to devote a lot of time and effort to the course. Likewise, an assumption that instructors are in a position to devote huge amounts of time to the course. So their ideas probably work in a parallel universe in which highly motivated students are taking one course at a time and full-time instructors teach one course at a time. Also, no recognition that sometimes one teaches huge cattle-classes, so any individual tailoring of anything goes out the window, and time-saving becomes a priority in assessment. No recognition of the realities of cheating, etc, either, nor of logistical snafus beyond our control (like scheduling conflicts).
I fully agree with the article in just about everything else, though. College instuctors should be either at least part-time practitioners and/or be making some contribution to the field other than solely teaching, although I'd add admin work to the list, with the caveat that the instructor should've at least been a practitioner or instructor in the past.

[Hegemony]

In my experience, the pedagogical trainings don't assume motivated, energetic students, but completely clueless students who need the most basic of instructions on every aspect of the course, for instance the point of doing a problem set or taking a short-answer quiz. All of this is spelled out for the student in laborious prose — though I guess it assumes that the student is motivated enough to read all that laborious prose, which is something I also have my doubts about.

Students may benefit from all this when they first start taking college classes, especially if they're coming from a weak high school. But by the time they're in their third or fourth year, they should be familiar with quizzes vs. papers, with why a discussion might be helpful to their learning, with why comparing things might reveal things about the things being compared, and so on. But we're admonished to spell these things out even for the most advanced classes. If this keeps up, it will spread to all of adult life, and pretty soon before we read a newspaper article, we'll be told how the article differs from a video, what the benefits of the article might be and the categories of understanding it will help us develop, and how the article will engage those of different learning styles.

[Ruralguy]

I highly doubt this, Hegemony. These teaching techniques have been pushed for decades now, at least 40 years, and very highly pushed for 20 of them. Yet, though articles and such have been dumbed down for even more than 40 years, I don't see these meta level descriptions...sometimes briefly in an educational tv/internet show.

[Hegemony]

(It was a joke.)