Characteristic tool

The Characteristic Tool is still under construction

 

The goal

The goal of this tool is to help you discover your teacher talents. You will score yourself on 49 teacher strategies from which your teacher characteristics scores are derived. For each characteristic you will see brief descriptions of classroom examples to give you inspiration to extend your classroom practices or to introduce new colours to your palette.

How to use the tool

  1. Think of a class that you are familiar with, which you have taught multiple times, or Think of your teaching over the past two years. What situations did you really like and gave you energy? How did you prepare? How did you interact with the students? Did you discuss your classes with colleagues and how were these discussions?

Please note that everyone has a personal set of talents and characteristics, which are all valuable. Do not try to score the list to define the ‘ideal’ teacher, but rather focus on scoring yourself. Your personal characteristics profile is most likely to provide you with inspiration afterwards.

  1. Go to the strategies and score them for yourself as a teacher. You can choose from one of three levels: very little, sometimes, and very often. Try to score quickly as it is difficult to do it very precisely. Remember that the strategies link to multiple characteristics and each characteristic builds on multiple strategies, so your profile is not steered by your score on a single strategy.

The strategies are presented to you seven at a time and there are seven pages in total, so 7*7 equalling 49 strategies.

Note: It will in the final version be presented on this website. For now, you have to use this Excel-file.

  1. After scoring all strategies, you will see an overview of your characteristics. A list with your personal scores and a spiderweb as a visual representation. You will see two columns and two lines. The left column/inner line represents your teacher characteristics profile that comes to you naturally. You have a strong preference to use the strategies associated to those. The right column/outer line shows the profile of teacher characteristic in a somewhat looser respect. Where it is different from the inner line, you tend to use the associated strategies less often.

Take some time to reflect on the profiles. Do they make sense? Did you realize that you scored so high on some characteristics?

  1. Read through the classroom examples of the characteristics on which you scored high with the inner line. There might be easy-to-use examples to try in an upcoming class.
  2. Read through the classroom examples of the characteristics on which you scored high with the inner line. These might be less easy to adopt in an upcoming class, but it should still be relatively easy.
  3. For a challenge, check the classroom examples of the characteristics on which you had lower scores. Apparently, these do not come naturally to you, but they might give you surprising classroom situations when trying them anyway.
  4. As in the previous three steps, check the videos in the eLibrary for inspiration or new approaches.