Personality Types and Classroom Management? Yes or No?

  I am at a Technology in Education conference.  I have been to several sessions but today I went to one on how knowing their personality type can help you with classroom management. 

The session began by having all attendees take a personality test by Tony Robbins.  When done, you'd get the results of your test and honestly the test for me was ridiculous because it had me put in order statements. 

The statements were short and half of the I did not relate to so I just did anything.  We were told we needed to take this personality test so we'd understand the explanations better.  Baloney.  I didn't need that since all that really happened was the presenter showed video clips from movies on each personality type.  This one used dominance, inducement, compliance, and submission.

I was waiting for him to discuss how to use this information to help with classroom management but when he never discussed it.  What it mostly came down to was as a teacher I should look at my personality type and see how it interacts with the kids personality.  Yuck.  I got nothing out of it.

As far as I can tell, there is no real research done on this topic. There appears to be no reputable connection between these personality types and classroom management.  I did find that these personality test is used more in business than education.  Any information, I found on this topic used a different set of labels but these tended to divide people into either  extrovert or introvert, sensing vs intuition, thinking vs feeling, or judgement vs perception. 

With the introverts vs extroverts, it is said the introverts prefer to work alone and they like to take time to think before answering questions while extroverts do better in groups and love to talk out loud.  Sensing focus on concrete details while intuition learners like to focus on the big picture.  Thinkers apply their knowledge as they want to without regard for the specific situation while feeling students like the rules especially if the rules take thier motivations into account.  Finally, perceiving students like to keep deadlines flexible while judging students like solid deadlines.

Each one of these is associated with a preferred cognitive style, studying style, and instructional style based on which one they are.  The bottom line is that the two don't seem to related for education.  I think that students have aspects of all the personality types.

All I can say is that the presentation did not meet my expectations and I found it was a waste of my time.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.  Let me know.