TPI Summaries of the Five Teaching Perspectives
  By Daniel D. Pratt and John B. Collins (2014)


Transmission: Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject
matter. Good teachers have mastery of the subject matter or content. It is a teacher's primary
responsibility to represent the content accurately and efficiently for learners. It is the leaner's
responsibility to learn that content in its authorized or legitimate forms. Good teachers take
learners systematically through sets of tasks that lead to content mastery. Such teachers provide
clear objectives, adjust the pace of lecturing, make efficient use of class time, clarify
misunderstandings, answer questions, provide timely feedback, correct errors, provide reviews,
summarize what has been presented, direct students to appropriate resources. set high standards for
achievement and develop objective means of assessing learning. Good teachers are enthusiastic about
their content and convey that enthusiasm to their students, and for many learners, they are
memorable presenters of their content.


Apprenticeship: Effective teaching is the process of enculturating students into a set of social
norms and ways of working.  Good teachers are highly skilled at what they teach. Whether in
classrooms or at work sites, they are recognized for their expertise. Teachers must reveal the
inner workings of skilled performance and must now translate it into accessible language and an
ordered set of tasks. Learning tasks usually proceed from simple to complex, allowing for different
points of observation and entry depending upon the learner's capability. Good teachers know what
their learners can do on their own and what they can do with guidance and direction; namely,
engaging learners' within their 'zone of development'. As learners mature and become more
competent, the teacher's role changes, and over time, teachers offer less direction and give more
responsibility as they progress from dependent learners to independent workers.


Developmental: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted “from the learner’s point of view.”
Good teachers must understand how their learners think and reason about the content. The primary
goal is to help learners develop increasingly complex and sophisticated cognitive structures for
comprehending the content. The key to changing those structures lies in a combination of two
skills: (a) effective questioning that challenges learners to move from relatively simple to more
complex forms of thinking, and (b) 'bridging knowledge’ which provides examples that are meaningful
to the learner. Questions, problems, cases, and examples form the bridges that teachers use to
transport learners from simpler ways of thinking and reasoning to new, more complex and
sophisticated forms of reasoning and problem solving. Good teachers work hard to adapt their
knowledge to each learner's level of understanding and ways of thinking.


Nurturing: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from
the heart as well as the head. People are motivated and productive learners when they are working
on issues or problems without fear of failure. Learners are nurtured by knowing that (a) they can
succeed at learning if they give it a good try; (b) their achievement is a product of their own
effort and ability, rather than the benevolence of a teacher; and (c) their efforts to learn will
be supported by their teacher and their peers. The more pressure to achieve, and the more difficult
the material, the more important it is that there be such support for learning. Good teachers
promote a climate of caring and trust, helping people set challenging but achievable goals, and
providing encouragement and support, along with clear expectations and reasonable goals for all
learners. They do not sacrifice self-efficacy or self-esteem for achievement. Therefore, the
assessment of learning considers individual growth or progress as well as absolute achievement.


SociaI Reform: Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways. From this point of
view, the

Object of teaching is the collective rather than the individual. Good teachers awaken students to
the values and ideologies that are embedded in texts and common practices within their discipline.
Good teachers challenge the status quo and encourage students to consider the how learners are
positioned and constructed in particular discourses and practices. To do so, common practices are
analyzed and deconstructed for the ways in which they reproduce and maintain conditions deemed
unacceptable. Class discussion is focused less on how knowledge has been created, and more by whom
and for what purposes. Texts are interrogated for what is said and what is not said: what is
included and what is excluded: who is represented and who is omitted from the dominant discourses
within a field of study or practice. Students are encouraged to take a critical stance to give them
power to take social action to improve their own lives; critical deconstruction, though central to
this view, is not an end in itself.


                        [Source: http://www.teachingperspectives.com/tpi/]