When asked to reflect on my reflective practice, I initially thought to myself - do I even have a reflective practice? It is easy to get caught up in the constant planning, marking, extracurricular activities and struggle to document everything that it seems like there is no time for reflection. However, I realised after reading Finlay's (2009) article that all of the above form a part of reflective practice - particularly what Zeichner and Liston define "review and repair" - the first two steps of proper reflective practice.
As part of my registration process as a beginning teacher, I often reach into the higher echelons of reflective practice. I am constantly reviewing the work I have done to see where it meets the standards of the teaching profession and wondering how I can improve the results in my classes.
At this early stage in my teaching career everything is 'new' - and sometimes things I try fail miserably, despite all my best intentions. I have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not go back to trying these innovations again. However, some retheorizing and reformulating could prove the key to improving my practice. An example of this is group work with some of my behaviourally challenged classes. Often times group work devolves into a mess of paper being thrown and cacophonous noise, with very little learning going on.
However, with proper reflection, I have been able to change this outcome - particularly through the use of digital tools - an important part of the SRI international (2015) 21st-century skills.
Viewing my reflective practice through Gibb's model (cited in Finlay, 2009) I realise I often only got to "evaluation" and didn't continue.
As I evolved and honed my teaching practice, I went back to my initial attempts and analysed what went wrong - and looked at what else I could have done. I realised that students were often failing to understand the instructions given AND not seeing 'the point'. I resolved to have instructions easy to see and understand and to discuss the importance of collaboration as a 21st-century skill. Making this group work a diagnostic 'assessment' added weight to the importance of it and the students took to it with vigour.
The similarities between this model and the Ministry of Education's (2009) teaching as inquiry model are easy to see and helped me realise that an inquiry doesn't have to be driven from above - I can do a mini-inquiry every lesson. Our school has an emphasis on teacher inquiry but this can often be seen as a 'box ticking' exercise, rather than the important, central aspect of being a dynamic teacher it is. I hope to begin sharing my reflective practice with others in my learning community and using it to feed-forward into my teaching.
I hope to build on my reflective practice throughout the next 16 weeks and look forward to reporting back to you all.
Reference list:
Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file…
Ministry of Education.(2009). Teaching as Inquiry. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-stories/Case-studies/Teachers-as-learners-Inquiry/Teaching-as-inquiry
SRI International (2015). 21 CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. [ebook] Microsoft Partners in Learning. Available at: https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research [Accessed 13 Aug. 2017].
