Reflecting on reflection, an interesting read and definitely food for thought regarding what I thought was reflective practice…
Which points captivate your attention?
Reflective practice
Finlay (2008) provided the chance for me to step back, look at my reflective practice and think about what I reflection looks like for me, each day, as a professional. It got me thinking. Am I reflecting just for the sake of reflecting? Do I reflect because it is what good teachers do, so I go through the motions to tick the reflective practitioner box? or Do I use critical thinking when reflecting in and/or during my teaching to do my best as a professional and for my students?
I think at different times the answer would be yes to each of these questions. Early on in my career most of my reflection had the ‘feel good factor’. I celebrated what went well and thought about the context of this, meaning I would then plan similar learning experiences to engage students. The major component of this is describing what happened and some reflection on factors that led to success or failure. I think that the evaluations, while honest would mostly serve to support my pre-conceived ideas of my teaching. That is that they subversively validated what I thought was right. Often the context of these situations may have played an important role.
Which reflective models do you find the most suitable to use?
Finlay (2008) discusses ‘thinking-in’, the reflection that is happening during teaching. At this stage of my career this is becoming more possible for me as I have more experiences to draw on, I am comfortable in the teacher role and being able to make a mistake. Having broader experience and moving towards more aspects of teacher mastery has freed up time for me to think about my core beliefs for teaching. This has occurred in conjunction post grad programme, changes are happening because I am evaluating what I think needs to happen for kids to be understanding.
The terminology around reflection discussed in Finlay (2008) was food for thought, I have used reflection and critical reflection interchangeably and focused more on the critical, what would I do next time rather, probably closely aligned to Gibb’s reflective cycle.
Thinking about my thinking, and jumping straight to the feedforward, I can see that adopting some of the critical reflection strategies in Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) will be more helpful, in two ways. The initial 3 stage process removes the aspect of pressure on myself as an individual (which all teachers are pretty good at applying to themselves often being perfectionists) then secondly I can identify with where I need to go to next to best suit the learning for the individuals in my class.
References:
Boud, D., Keogh, R. and Walker, D. (1985) Promoting reflection in learning: a model. In D. Boud, R. Keogh and D. Walker (eds.) Reflection: turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page.
Finlay, L. (2008) Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file/ecms/web-content/Finlay-%282008%29-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf
Gibbs Reflective cycle retrieved from https://www.kent.ac.uk/learning/PDP-and-employability/pdp/reflective.html
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