To me, critical reflection is a major part of my teaching practise, to be honest I can’t see how you could be a successful educator without it. Reading through the course notes, I know I don’t deep dive into the whole process and I certainly don’t have time to follow any models as such. However I know that over time I have become more effective at looking back at a learning experience, thinking about what went well and what I call “even better if”. I found the five levels of reflections described by Finlay (2008) a good way to evaluate on my own reflective practise. For me, a lot of my reflective moments are what Finlay (2008) describes as “rapid”, a quick analysis of how things are going and what I need to do make it work better. This is when I’m in class management mode, it doesn’t require deep thinking but more intuition. As an experienced teacher I feel these are almost second nature, when you are a beginning teacher it’s these decisions you tend to doubt. I wonder if this type of reflection could be mistaken for just knowing what worked well before therefore no real reflection is needed - like being on automatic pilot and not really changing your practise or looking for new solutions. When I work with children on their specific learning needs, my reflections need to be more thoughtful and directed. Just like rapid reflection, I do this in the moment but is not rushed or spontaneous, it requires thinking back to other situations that worked and applying the lessons learnt from that experience. This repair style reflection means that I would alter my behaviour depending on who and what I was working on. I think I do this type of reflection really well, however I know when I’m tired or stress that my patience and ability to empathise is greatly reduced. It’s harder to take the time to reflect when you feel you have exhausted all your ideas in the tool kit and frustration has set in. In that situation, I usually review what happened on my drive home where I can remove myself my the situation and look at it more rationally. This review style of reflection also happens in our team meetings but in reflection probably only at a surface level. Each week we sit together and korero about how our week has gone, children we are concerned about and we have the opportunity to share our thoughts and feelings. In theory this is a great opportunity for critical reflective practise, however we probably spend too much time discussing the what, who and how, while failing to go deeper by looking into the why and ways this will move us forward. If we spent more time thinking about the causes of learning deficiency then our solutions may be more long term. Finlay goes onto discuss two other levels of reflection that I know I could improve on in my practise one being research and the other reauthorizing and reformulating. Even though for my target learners, I would collect and analyse data over a longer period of time I don’t spend any time reading research or finding out about academic theories to critically examine my teaching practise. To be honest that style of learning doesn’t really interest me, I would rather go and speak to another college or observe someone teaching. I don’t think it really matters how you find your solutions, as long as you are always actively moving forward in your thinking by reflecting on your past and the lessons you have learnt. Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file…
5 Comments
Penny Madden
11/30/2017 12:09:02 am
Hi Trudi, I am glad to know there are other people out there who aren't all that proactive about searching out scholarly articles to justify their teaching and learning decisions. I also like to be presented with the information orally, in one to one or small groups to discuss or debate.
Reply
Hi Trudi,
Reply
Johanna Freeman
12/1/2017 12:50:37 pm
I totally agree with you that rapid reflection becomes second nature to experienced teachers. I do it myself as well. You say that you wonder whether this type of reflection could be mistaken for just knowing what worked well before and therefore may not be real reflection. I pondered this and in my opinion, this is a valid form of reflection. As teachers, we constantly learn from our experiences through thinking about what has worked in a specific lesson and what did not, and making changes accordingly. This forms our bank of knowledge of “what worked well before” that we draw from daily. From this perspective, I do believe this kind of ‘on-the-go’ reflection, which you are referring to, constitutes true reflection. It may not be deep thinking in that moment, but the ‘intuition’ you refer to is developed through hours of collective reflecting and thinking about our practice, and making adjustments accordingly. For me, the danger to be aware of with this rapid reflection is that it is mainly based on my own perspective. Time to reflect formally is a real constraint in teaching. I think we should try to balance this automatic reflection process with conversations with colleagues so we allow other perspectives to challenge our thinking, and we can learn from their experiences as well.
Reply
trudi Fausett
12/3/2017 12:03:12 am
Hi Johanna
Reply
Jo Weldon
12/4/2017 12:32:56 am
Trudi, I loved the way you have looked at your team meetings, as this is an area that I would love to improve on also. I love that you have discussed ways of looking into learning deficiencies to increase better solutions and outcomes for students.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
March 2018
Categories |