One
school year has ended and the next is (hopefully after a time of rest) soon to
begin. Summer is a good time to reflect upon what worked in my classes and what
did not. What will I keep? What will I change? What will I eliminate? What would
I like to tweak or try?
Reflective
practice... is the habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge,
technical skills, reasoning, emotions, values and reflection in daily practice
for the benefit of the individuals and communities being served. (Epstein and
Hundert, 2002)
Introduced in 1987 by Donald Schon, the
concept of reflective practice is a way for beginning teachers to match their
own practices to those of successful practitioners and for experienced educators
to reflect on the effectiveness of their lessons and to be aware of the need to
change practices and/or direction as their student population changes. As the
concept grew in popularity, many schools, colleges, and departments of
education began designing teacher education and professional development
programs based on this concept.
Unfortunately,
in our need to reduce everything to its most basic components so that we can do
it faster and have more people doing it, ended up giving us what Boud and
Walker (1998) refer to as a “checklist” or “reflection on demand” mentality, where
the reflective processes have no link to conceptual frameworks, and teachers
are required to reflect without an established context for their particular
teaching/learning situation. Reflection then becomes just another piece of
“fluff and stuff” that teachers must do in order to maintain their status.
And
yet…. reflecting on teaching is frequently cited as a fundamental practice for
personal and professional development (Biggs, 2003; Boud et al., 1985; Lyons,
2002), although few see it as more than a time-consuming, abstract concept with
no real practical benefits.
Reflecting
on my practice as a teacher is what allowed me to spend over 40 years in
education without burning out. Teaching
is complex and, as practitioners, we are faced with hundreds of decisions
during our lesson planning as well as during delivery of said lesson. It is the perfect example of “ongoing
assessment” as we are led from the pre-assessment (or what our students know),
to interim assessments (how the lesson is going and what our students are
deriving from it), to summative assessments (what have we accomplished and what
do our students know and are able to do).
The
ability to reflect on what we do, how we do it and, especially, why we do it and then to develop, adapt, and change
our plans to fit our particular student population – a population that is
becoming ever so diverse in its composition and its needs – is what takes us on
the road from newbie to expert.
Why do we need to make time
to reflect now more than ever?
The
major changes in education make it necessary for us to rethink our role as
teachers, to focus on curricular integration, teaching for meaning, interactive
dialogue, socialization, and collaboration within the context of the
classroom. The move from the
teacher-directed classroom has been in the making for many years, and yet we
are, on a daily basis, bombarded by models, programs, and books that take away
our ability to interact with our teaching environment and our students, by
providing us with canned and scripted lessons that are only superficially
interactive or meaningful.
If excellence
in teaching, and improved educational outcomes for all students is what we
aspire to achieve, then we need to regularly make time to evaluate our
approaches to teaching and learning.
This includes knowing WHO are our students are and what their needs are;
building partnerships within our schools, communities and businesses; establishing
flexible learning environments utilizing those partnerships; creating new contexts
for learning and revamping the old ones; and exploring what our students need
to learn and how best to expose them to that learning.
Critical
reflection allows us to become expert teachers, relying on a large set of
skills and strategies that we often weave into our teaching instinctively. Reflection allows us to look back at our
choices and actions to remind us that they are based on sound educational
principles and the knowledge that we have of our students.
