Who Practices What? A Correlational Study of Personality Type and Teaching Reflection

Abstract

The debates of Prabhu (1990) and Kumaravadivelu (1994; 2001; 2003; 2006) against the “designer methods” (Nunan, 1989) highlighted the importance of the teacher and what he or she can actually do in the classroom. Therefore, teachers are no longer looked at the only transferors of knowledge but also bringing with themselves teaching initiatives among which is their capability to reflect on their practices in their classes. Drawing on John Dewey's ideas, Akbari (2007) defined a reflective teacher as the “one who critically examines his/her practices, comes up with some ideas as how to improve his/her performance to enhance students’ learning, and puts those ideas into practice” (p. 194). However, given the fact that all teachers are not of the same personality types, it is hypothesized that teachers with one particular personality type prefer to rely on one element of teaching reflection. This provided enough impetus for us to investigate the relationship between the teachers’ personality types and their teaching reflection elements. To this end, we drew on John and Srivastava's (1999) the Big Five Inventory Personality Test and Akbari et. al's (2010) the reflective teaching instrument and asked 200 university professors to fill them out. The results confirmed the hypothesis that each personality type correlated with particular elements of the teaching reflection. Extrovert teachers, for instance, were found to draw on the affective element in their teaching practices. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.