Educating All Students
Introverts versus Extraverts
Classification
Extraverting = outward turning
Introverting = inward turning
To extravert is to:
- Look outward for interests, values, and ideas
- Think out loud
- Reveal half through ideas
- Process experiences outwardly
- Look inward for interests, values, and ideas
- Keep ideas inside
- Polish thoughts before exposing them
- Process experiences inwardly
*Extraversion and Introversion also refer to how the dominant type in a person's mental process (Sensing/Intuition/Thinking/Feeling) is used -- inwardly or outwardly.
Personality Structures & Motivation in the Classroom
Extravert:
- Continuously alerted to events outside themselves
- Active trial and error approach
- Turning outward to pick up cues, interests, expectations, and values
- Continuously altered to events within themselves and others
- Reflective approach to life
- Look inward for resources and cues and purse fewer interests deeply
E/I Preferences & Learning
Extraversion
Cognitive style:
- Learning by talking and physically engaging the environment
- Letting attention flow outward toward objective events
- Talking to help thoughts to form and become clear
- Learning through interactions, verbal and non-verbal
Study style:
- Acting first, reflecting after
- Plunging into new material
- Starting interactions needed to stimulate reflection and concentration
- Having a strong, interesting, external extraverted reason for studying beyond learning for its own sake
- Avoiding distractions that will cut into their concentration
- Studying with a friend,
- Studying to prepare to teach someone
Instruction that fits Es:
- opportunities to 'think out loud"; for example, one-to-one with the teacher, classroom discussions, working with another student, action projects involving people
- learning activities that have an effect outside the learner, such as visible results from a project
- teachers who manage classroom dialogue so that extraverts have ways to clarify their ideas before they add them to class discussion
- assignments that let them see what other people are doing and what they regard as important
Introversion
Cognitive style:
- Quiet reflection
- Keeping one's thoughts inside until they are polished
- Letting attention flow inward
- Being engrossed in inner events ideas, impressions, concepts
- Learning in private, individual ways
Study style:
- Reflecting first, acting after (if necessary)
- Looking for new data to fit into the internal dialogue that is always going on
- Working privately perhaps checking one's work with someone who is trusted
- Reading as the main way of studying
- Listening to others talk about the topic being studied, and privately processing what they take in
- Extraverting just when they choose to
Instruction that fits I's:
- Work internally with their own thoughts: listening, observing, lab work, reading, writing
- Processing their experiences at their own pace
- Present the results of their work in forms that let them keep their privacy
- Have ample time to polish their work before needing to present it
- Have time to reflect before answering the teacher's questions
- Tie their studies to their own personal interests, their internal agenda
Michigan State University College of Education
Teacher Education Graduate Students:
- Anne Billington billin50@msu.edu
- Catherine Coyne coynecat@msu.edu
- Dustin Flake flakedus@msu.edu
- Megan Purcell purcel30@msu.edu
- Symantha Reilly reillysy@msu.edu
Website: http://www.educ.msu.edu/
Location: Michigan State University | College of Education, East Lansing, MI
Sources & Further Reading
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. Print.
Lawrence, Gordon. People Types & Tiger Stripes. Gainesville, FL: Center for Applications of Psychological Type, 1993. Print.
Pannapacker, William. "Screening Out the Introverts." The Chronicle of Higher Education. N.p., 15 Apr. 2012. Web. 13 Mar. 2013.