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Reflection
A core part of teaching and learning and more importantly developing as a teacher is the process of critical reflection. The best teachers are able to respond well and quickly to situations in their classrooms and it is this process of critical response and development that we are looking to develop.
"Reflection is a form of mental processing that we use to fulfil a purpose or to achieve some anticipated outcome. It is applied to gain a better understanding of relatively complicated or unstructured ideas and is largely based on the reprocessing of knowledge, understanding and, possibly, emotions that we already process"
Jenny Moon (2005)
Schön (1983) talks about two types of reflection: reflection-in-action, which takes place during an event; and reflection-on-action, which takes place after an event.
reflection-in-action
reflection-on-action
Experiencing
Thinking on your feet
Thinking about what to do next
Acting straight away
Thinking about something that has happened
Thinking what you would do differently next time
Taking your time
So an example might be in a lesson:
reflecting-in-action
You have just given instruction for a piece of work and a minute later you see two pupils chatting to each other,
You tell these pupils off,
You move one of the pupils to an empty seat and tell them to get on with their work.
reflecting-on-action
You are thinking about the talking incident and wonder if you made assumptions about why the children were talking and you also noted that telling them off distracted the rest of the class,
You develop a card system where the pupils need to put a card face-up (green) or face-down (yellow) on their desks if they are not sure what to do,
You test this system in the next lesson and find that it minimise noise.
One way of developing these skills is to keep a reflective journal, this is a piece of writing which allows you to record your thoughts and insights about your own learning experiences. It encourages you to review experiences and to evaluate your practice over time to help you to develop more and more critical skills.
Watch the piece of video below and think about the questions it asks:
Reflective Practice - Keeping a reflective journal
Reflective Foci and Process
Read this model of Gibbs' Reflective Cycle (1988):
Below is a way that you can then use this cycle to apply this to reflective critical incident analysis. Critical incidents can be anything that makes you think about the process of teaching:
There are a number of ways of thinking about reflection and how we can meta-cognitively organise this. We can think about meta-cognative abilities, of foci of reflection and on the areas we want to develop with the reflection process.
Elements of meta-cognitive reflection
Awareness of one's learning experiences,
Evaluation of these experiences,
Regulation or change of attitudes or behaviours.
Foci of reflection
Content: the "whats" of the learning experience,
Process: the "hows" of the learning experience,
Reasons" the "whys" of learning experience.
Developments/Changes: We should reflect on the learning experiences to in order to facilitate our:
Academic development
Professional development
Personal development
1: Exploring a learning experience:
Awareness ...
Evaluation ...
Regulation ...
CONTENT (what)
What have I learned?
Do I understand why I have learned?
What can I do to get a better understanding?
PROCESS (how)
How did I teach this?
What strategies did I use to teach this?
How effective was this strategy?
How can I make this more effective?
Is this the best way I can do this?
How well did the student learn this?
What strategies did they use to learn this?
How effective was this strategy?
How effective was this strategy?
How can I make this more effective?
Is this the best way they could do this?
REASON (why)
Why did I teach this?
What were the drivers for doing so?
Was there a more useful thing to have done?
2: Thinking of a learning experience in relation to my:
Awareness ...
Evaluation ...
Regulation ...
Academic
Development
How does this experience experience contribute to my academic development?
What are my short and long goals?
What are my longer term goals for learning / development?
Am I making good progress?
Is this a good thing to be doing?
Are there other options?
What obstacles have I encountered?
What is the source of these obstacles?
How can I remove them?
What literature have I read in connection with this experience?
Does this support or challenge my current position?
Do I need to change my way of thinking?
Professional
Development
How does this experience experience contribute to my professional development?
What are my short and long goals?
What are my longer term goals for learning / development?
Am I making good progress?
Is this a good thing to be doing?
Are there other options?
How does this link into the teachers' standards?
In what way does this show my development as a teacher?
Are there better ways to show this?
Personal
Development
What does this experience mean to me?
What does this experience tell me about where I current am as a developing teacher?
Do I need to change?
What might my learning journal look like?
There is no prescriptive form for writing a journal but we can build on Gibbs' cycle (above) by following the model by suggested by Heath (1988):
Reflective Journal: According to the Gibbs' (1988) model - PDF
Reflective Journal: According to the Heath (1998) model - PDF
