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OPTIONS SURVEY: |
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AN INTRODUCTION TO PERSONALITY TYPE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO LEARNING STYLE
People's habits tell a lot about them. Not just their "good" and "bad" habits, but also such habits as what they pay attention to, what they care about, and how they decide things. These are mental habits.
Do you know any people with mental habits like these? Chris is quick to notice people's feelings, and tries to stay out of arguments. Jan likes to argue, likes to explain things, and sometimes doesn't notice people's feelings. John's father wants him to keep a careful record of how he spends his weekly allowance. John says record keeping isn't important to him. Pat wishes her mother would watch the clock more and get to places on time. Pat's mother wishes Pat would relax and not get an ulcer over being five minutes late.
Some mental habits are very deep in a person. Trying to change them is like trying to change the stripes on a tiger -- like trying to change the grain in a piece of wood. The information that follows is about mental habits -- the kind we probably can't change but can learn to use better.
PATTERNS
The deep mental habits were first described by Carl Jung in his theory of psychological types. He saw these "types" as a distinctive way of classifying human behavior. His research showed him that many of our behaviors cluster in patterns that seem to reveal different frames of mind, distinctly different ways of processing our experiences--we are constantly choosing between the open act of perceiving (or finding out, discovering) and the closed act of judging (or taking action, deciding, evaluating). Isabel Myers developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) self-survey as a means of providing individuals with important information about how self responds to the world. Gordon Lawrence and his colleagues, at the Center for Applications of Psychologyical Types at the University of Florida--Gainesville, have spent years using psychological type theory and the MBTI to gather research in educational settings which would contribute to the professional literature on how to improve teaching and instructional leadership.
Described in the following "pages" are eight patterns you can use to study yourself, your friends and family. Pick out your own patterns. There are no better or worse patterns. Think carefully and try to pick the patterns that really describe you best.
You will have the opportunity to respond to 28 questions in four categories, presented to you in a questionnaire, OPTIONS: Determining Type Preferences for Adolescents developed by Dr. Carolyn Marie Mamchur, (1996) Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Interpretations that follow on these pages as well as those we will use in class discussion will be adapted from Dr. Mamchur's book, A Teacher's Guide to Cognitive Type Theory and Learning Style (1996) , and Gordon Lawrence's People Types and Tiger Stripes, 3rd edition, (1996).
Let's begin our examination of the concept of learning styles by completing the following self-survey, OPTIONS.