A Defender in a Professional Learning Network

The Results

I'll admit that I was first shocked to see the results of my personality tests. For variation, I took the 16Personalities test first, My Personality Test's Personality Type Indicator a few days later, and FiveThirtyEight's quiz the following week. I remember taking similar personality type quizzes in high school and college, and the results were always the same: INFJ. Despite my expectations, I did not get these results this time around. 

According to both 16Personalities and Personality Type Indicator, my MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) personality is ISFJ-A. 

Image courtesy of 16Personalities

Image courtesy of Personality Type Indicator

According to the two assessments, I am an introverted, observant, feeling, judging, and assertive person. The only shocker in those statistics is the "S" category. As I mentioned, I was always INFJ, so I was quite surprised to see an S instead of an N in both test results. As I investigated this mysterious "S" more, I learned that it means that I have a more observant personality compared to an intuitive personality. Once understanding the meaning of these two descriptors, I completely agree that I have shifted my outlook and approach to problems and solutions since college, and I think that my last four years in a school setting can be attributed to that change. 

As 16Personalities explains, the main difference between mind intuitive (N) and observant (S) personalities is how they use the information they gather. Observant individuals prefer observable facts and straightforward outcomes, while intuitive individuals use their imaginative and creative abilities to envision the potential of their outcomes. After spending four years teaching within a district that is extremely rigid in its expectations of teachers and students and creation of programs and processes that must be fulfilled to their liking, I think that I adopted an observant outlook. As I plan to eventually leave the classroom, I wonder if I take these assessments again at that time if I will stay within the observant mindset, or if I will find myself as an INFJ once again.

The third and final assessment I completed was FiveThirtyEight's personality assessment. This quiz differed from the previous two, for instead of using the typical MBTI personality types, it gave me scores on five different important traits based how strongly I associated with each trait on a scale from 0 to 100. My results were as follows:

Images courtesy FiveThirtyEight

I found the results of this assessment much harder to interpret, and somewhat contradictory to what the other results concluded and what I think about myself. Particularly, that I scored 50 out of 100 points in the "Extraversion" category. This category speaks to know extroverted a person is, but not in the way one may think. This quiz takes sociability, assertiveness, and energy level into its scoring system. Having scored high on the energy level and assertiveness questions, I was deemed a "moderate" extrovert. While I'm not sure I agree with how this site groups personality traits, I can understand how I earned this label.

Next Steps

As I continued to research the patterns and attributes of individuals with an ISFJ personality type, I noticed that there were many mentions of their reluctance to change. In both my personal and professional life, being reluctant to change is something I am definitely guilty of.

As I look forward to my next year teaching 3rd grade, this is an area I would like to grow in, not only for myself, but for my students. To do this, I have written the following goals to be accomplish during the 2024-2025 school year:

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Since the district I will be working in this fall splits the school year into trimesters, I thought that giving myself a goal to achieve within each trimester would give me enough time to successfully prepare and then implement what I have in mind. By pushing myself out of my comfort zone and experimenting with new resources and techniques to reach the goals within their determined time frames, not only will I improve my professional practice, but I will be giving my students an education that meets their needs as members of a technologically advanced society. Additionally, I will then be able to contribute value information related to my or my students' successes or shortcomings to colleagues within my professional learning network.