Insight guidelines

Clicking on the title of this blog entry will take you to the Insight Game, which Brandon and Desiree mentioned in class today (Jan. 25, 2010). It's sort of like a card game, with each card having two sides from which you pick and then "place" on the table. The "flip" function allows you to flip the card to the other side to see the other choice (or you can just click on the card and it will flip). You must pick one choice from each card. Sometimes this is not easy. You may find you don't like either sides of a card or that you have trouble deciding which side is most appropriate. Just try to pick what seems closest.

After you've picked a side from each card, hit "analyze" and the game will come up with a four-letter code that best represent your styles in interacting with ideas, in gathering information, and in making decisions, and in interacting with the world. It also provides a synopsis of how your personality typing might be described. Click "next" and you will see further details and cartoon illustrations of the four different aspects identified. Here I encourage you to especially look at your Learning Style because these descriptions may help you make choices about how you prepare and participate in classes.

The Insight Game is a brief, icon-driven alternative to the pen-and-paper Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionaire. It allows you to get a general idea of your four preferences in attitude or the world in which you prefer to gather ideas (Extravert/Introvert), perception or information gathering (Sensing/iNtuition), decision-making (Thinking/Feeling), and lifestyle, or relating to the outside world, (Judgment/Perception). Please take the test and then blog about your results.

WARNING: Write down your results. The website says it will email them to you, but I've taken the test a few times and have never gotten an email. Also, once you move to the cartoon details, you cannot hit "back" to check your overall score.

The instructor as ENFJ

The Insight Game came up with the same results as the full Myers-Briggs questionnaire I completed last year found.

As the graduate student representatives said today, sometimes preferences will be really close. For example, although my overall score shows an ENFJ, the score is very close on the last letter (Judgment/Perception) and I have answers from both sides of the card for each preference. As an instructor, I was particularly interested in how my ENFJ shows up in teaching. You may notice that the details are concerned mainly with the two middle letters of the analysis. As an NF, the game says I "tend to shy away from rigid outlines, rules and schedules." That depends on the definition of rigid. I develop all those things, including a detailed outline for each class. However, I also adjust each of them depending on who is in the class and what students need. I never teach the same course exactly the same way twice. That is far too rigid for me.

Another teaching characteristic of NF's is that they "try to relate philosophical issues to academic subjects: their impact on human destiny." This is illustrated in my ideas about creating community.

NFs treat each student as an individual, which is true of my teaching philosophy. However, the game says NFs often "fail to realize or emphasize vocational, occupational, "real-life" applications," and I encourage you to explore the field you are considering and how issues related to community manifest in your field. So I might argue that I'm not an NF that way. The other characteristic in which I don't think NF applies in grading, which the game says NF's do subjectively. By using tools like the Writing Program rubric, the grading scale outlined in the syllabus, and basic math, I try to take much of the subjectivity out of grading. I'm more concerned with being fair and consistent. (I confess the cartoon annoys me, in which the instructor makes allowances for a student's absence.)

As a student, the NF label fit especially well in describing us as "masterful in interpreting signs and symbols of meaning" and being an "intellectual butterfly" that moves from one field to the next. As many of you know, teaching college is my fourth career -- having already been a newspaper editor, the vice president of a public relations firm in Chicago's Loop, and the corporate communications director of a multinational firm. I stayed in each of them about ten years before being ready for a new challenge. Meanwhile, other people look for a job that they hope to stay in for most of their lives.

Every corporate job I've ever interviewed for required that I take the Myers-Briggs. Over the years, my scores in Extravert and Judgment have increased slightly but I've pretty much always been an NF!

I'll be interested to see what your scores reveal about the class and how we might work together going forward.