How My Personality Affects My Teaching

Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs personality test? After taking a few different iterations of it, I've learned that my personality type is ESFJ/P, which essentially means that I:

• am extroverted
• tend to make decisions based on facts and logic rather than my intuition or theoretical information
• see situations through the lens of my personal experience and beliefs
• prefer organization, structure, and being able to see the big picture upfront

You can see from the chart that I’m more or less in the middle 50% of the spectrum in all categories, and I actually fall dead center on the Judgment/Perception spectrum. According to the Myers-Briggs descriptors, this means I try to foster community amongst groups of people and help individuals find their value within that community. It also means that I am good at taking specific action in order to benefit other people.

Reading over these descriptions after taking the test, I can definitely see these attributes in myself, my decision to become a music teacher in the first place, and in my day-to-day teaching practices.

• As a music teacher, I have to walk a fine line between fact- and logic-based teaching and appealing to the emotions of my students and our theoretical (and sometimes real) audiences. Sometimes the focus of a rehearsal needs to be technical details and helping my students improve their skills. Other times, it’s more important to develop the emotional tone of a performance and decide what story or message we want to convey to our audience.
• I tend to choose music for my ensembles with which I am familiar, and often they are pieces I have performed myself. This gives me some immediate insight into the possible challenges that might come up, which helps me know how to address them. I also have a tendency to stick to musical styles that I feel are significant in some way. For example, I program more classical and classical-style music than I do popular music, partially because I feel it’s important for my students to know some standard historical repertoire, and partially because some types of music offer more learning opportunities than other types do.
• In addition to teaching and the time I spend in direct contact with students, my time is divided into many more categories and roles. I act as my own secretary, filling out paperwork for fundraisers and field trips, handling money for those activities, and ordering equipment, sheet music, and uniforms. I am the travel agent for my program, planning and coordinating all the logistics of trips and being the lead chaperone. I am an equipment manager, keeping track of inventory and making sure every instrument is in working order all the time. I’m the one dreaming up any new ideas and innovations for the entire music program at my school. All of these tasks require me to be incredibly organized and to have schedules and goals mapped out far in advance.

Of course, these personality traits also have an impact on how I relate to and interact with students. I am very much a “people person” and enjoy building relationships with my students, which I firmly believe makes me a better teacher. I love getting to know them as individuals and supporting their endeavors outside of my class. When dealing with an issue, whether musical or personal, I try to gather as much information as possible before offering a possible solution. And of course, one of my biggest goals as a music teacher is to create a safe community where students can find their identity and make lasting friendships. That’s ultimately more important to me than whether or not they remember how to play their major scales from memory once they graduate.