Week 17 - My Reflective Practice




Descriptive Stage

In my current reflective practice I tend to reflect through two main mediums - the first being face-to-face reflection with my peers, and the second being on my planning sheet daily as things work well, or need adapting depending on the students needs. I used to have a third reflective practice in which I typed into a Google doc.  weekly, however I stopped doing this as I felt I wasn’t getting anything from it and it was more a task I ‘had to do’ as it was part of my BT mentoring - I didn’t understand the purpose of it then. Looking at the online survey responses from week 17 from my peers, it appears that the majority also reflect on their practice on their own or with a peer. Had I had a reflection model such as Jay and Johnson’s (2002) reflective model to base my reflections on, I could have seen the purpose of reflecting on my own practice.

Comparative Stage

The thought of sharing my reflections ‘out loud’ makes me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable to criticism and be judged. However,  looking at peer responses from the online survey; the majority of responses disagree that critical reflection is about ‘criticising colleagues work’ but about ‘challenging the existing assumptions and being informed by reliable sources’. Basing my reflections on the questions in the Jay and Johnson’s reflective model and reflecting through Schon’s ‘reflection-on-action’ ( 1983) via blogging or online forums, a new collaborative medium and gateway opens up for me to express and access new ideas and perspectives, that could help me gain new insights of self and/or practice (Boud et al 1985; Boyd and Fales, 1983; Mezirow, 1981, Jarvis, 1992) that might inform and enhance my teaching practice. As Dewey (1993) argues, reflection is a process where we ‘think the problem out’ (Finlay, 2009) and use this to plan and action our ideas out and I can see that reflecting through a more collaborative medium, I am opening myself up to different/wider perspectives, theories and information to take on board for my classroom practice.

Critical Reflection

After examining my current reflective practice I can see that my current practice is only ‘surface’ reflecting, with only my current teaching practice knowledge  as I haven’t engaged in outside reflection or theory to inform my teaching practice. I can see the many benefits of using a reflection model to base my reflections on, such as Jay and Johnson’s 3 tiered reflection model or Zeichner and Liston’s model (1996) where reflection can happen between five different levels and platforms during the teaching process. Reflecting needs to become a daily habit for me, and through this, eventually enable a personal transformation (Flessner, 2012) of my teaching agency and practice.
Blogging and online forums would allow me to mutually collaborate with fellow peers through an open platform and give me insight to a wider audience and different ways of adapting my classroom practice and guide my planning. I have started a blog and shared it via online forums and joined several online discussion groups so far, and I am quite excited at the prospect of gaining new knowledge and integrating this into my teaching practice!



References


Flessner, Ryan. (2012). Agency through teacher education reflection, community, and learning.

Fook, J. (2006) Beyond reflective practice: reworking the “critical” in critical reflection. Keynote speech for conference “Professional lifelong learning: beyond reflective practice”, July 3.

Schon, D.A. (1983),  The reflective practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Comments

  1. Unknown28 March 2018 at 01:45

    You raised some very similar points to me. I also liked the 5 points of reflection by Ziechner and Liston. I can see myself incorporating that into my teaching inquiry!

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  2. Whaea31 March 2018 at 01:25

    Hi Susan
    After reading other blogs this week I have come to the conclusion that most have similar practice to us i.e. as you describe "surface" reflections. I think it is better to frame this as our current stage of learning in our journeys of lifelong learning...most of us must look forward as our next steps in learning (the same as we identify for our classes)...reframe problems, question our own assumptions by researching alternatives and look at situations from multiple perspectives.

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