Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Instructional Resources for Marching Band

In the teaching world, it's universally accepted that teachers steal ideas and resources from each other. I've found that when you're the sole person responsible for an entire high school music program, this becomes even more crucial to survival. For every concept or skill you teach, there is guaranteed to be someone else out there who has taught it already, and maybe even someone who has created a resource for other teachers to use. With marching band in particular, the easiest way to teach certain techniques is to model or show the correct way to perform them. Below is a list of several helpful videos for different marching band-related skills. I've also included some useful articles and presentation resources by other band directors. Videos: A good beginner's tutorial on basic upper and lower body positions A stretching routine for the beginning of rehearsal Five of the most common flag tosses  for color guard Rifle toss fundamentals Marching ba...
Post a Comment
Read more

Teaching and Learning Styles

You've probably heard before that everyone learns differently. Some of us are visual learners, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic, and so on. But it turns out there are a couple of different theories when it comes to defining exactly what kinds of different learning styles exist and how they manifest themselves. The Index of Learning Styles, developed by Richard Felder and Barbara Solomon at North Carolina State University, gives a little more detailed insight into different learning styles and the implications they might have on our teaching practices. I am somewhere between active and reflective, meaning I prefer to learn by doing (also the motto of Cal Poly, my alma mater) and I encourage my students to do the same, but I also prefer to work alone instead of in groups. I have a hard time relying on others to hold up their end of a group project, and I sympathize with students who feel the same, but they have to overcome this in an ensemble setting. I encourage stud...
Post a Comment
Read more