How is Reflection Relevant to My Professional Standing

The question I chose to answer is "How is reflection relevant to my professional standing?" First I have to think about what I mean by "My Professional Standing". I'm struggling with this idea, especially after everything that has been going on lately.

As a professional educator, I have always focused my attention to be innovative while I create teaching and funding ideas, develop presentations, find and apply educational tools, and employ funding and strategies to benefit teachers and their students.

Time always kills excellence when you have so many tasks to complete. Let's be honest, I would rather teach and research than be involved in administrative tasks. Unfortunately, I've been asked to do so and I'm a sucker for opportunities to help others. This involves plenty of work and time.

Some people think of me as a negotiator, but I don't really see myself this way, especially lately. We have our limits and I am certainly reaching them. Not that I don't attempt to learn what I can to see if there is a theory, a model, or a strategy to break the gridlock of competing ideologies.

How much should we give in to others ideas for the sake of moving forward? You can negotiate yourself out of existence or ruin the work you've done to build programs to a level that has given you and others the opportunities to gain respect.

If my professional standing is to be a negotiator, is it dependent on ideas that have worked? If it is to develop and expand the programs we have, do we have to maintain what has brought them such acclaim. Or, do we change our viewpoint. Of course, you may wonder "What acclaim?" If you do, then I've failed to communicate how the programs we've worked to do which is to implement programs that have elevated the thinking and careers of its participants.

It's possible that the best way to promote a "professional standing" is to get the word out by promoting oneself and the work we have done. We need to get people talking about our work, the challenges, and the reasons why we want to be considered as professional educators. We have to overcome the public's notion that anyone can be a teacher. This is a serious problem and its probably because we haven't done a good job of letting others know what it takes to be an excellent professional educator. When we do then we'll have reached that level of professional standing. Everyone around us need to see that we are thinking about how to help students learn what they need to get through life and elevate ourselves in the process.

Reflective Practice Workshop with Student Teachers

On Friday I presented my reflective practice workshop to over one hundred student teachers. The students were receptive to the ideas and like always a few actually came over to tell me that they were thinking of using these tips. I tried to make a case that this is hard to do because it takes commitment and plenty of effort.

The reality is that I know they will be very busy, but I tried to give them some ideas to make the process easier to undertake. I stressed to them that writing is tough and it is even tougher when you have to criticize yourself. This brings me to my thoughts about what I learned from researching, developing, and presenting on reflective practice.

Active reflection can be as simple as documenting what we do every time we present a lesson or, for me, a workshop. This was something that I come to realize when thinking about my own practice. The easiest method is what Schon called "Learning in Action". We go through the steps of thinking about what we plan to do prior to the event and then afterwards thinking about how we're going to change things if we ever do it again.

I know that the workshop was well received so I have a feeling that I will be doing the "reflective practice" workshop again. Hopefully, I can transfer what I learned from the research and presentation as I prepare for my SITE paper and presentation.

Where do I start? More than likely I'll follow the advice I gave to students and this is to use guiding questions. Guided reflection is probably something that is simple to use and something that I'll try to apply as I work on this blog. It requires that I develop questions to guide my reflective thoughts. I have to say that I'm not good at coming up with questions, so as I develop them, I'll think about how my personal questioning actually improves.

I'm going to start with this first question and it will be the topic of my next blog post. "How is reflective practice relevant to my professional standing?"

Focusing on Reflective Practice

Coming up with a conference idea for SITE is going to be a challenge. The main topic is reflective practice using available technologies. A quick search this week of reflective practice blogs turned out a surprising number of blogs. The challenge is going to be finding a slant to this very popular venue.

Obviously, I could focus on science education teacher blogs that exemplify reflective practice. The idea is to find teachers who use the dialogue to improve instruction. The limits to this approach will be identified in the next few posts, but for now I'm content in letting everyone know that this is the topic and the approach I plan to take.

Of course,  the article needs to convince others to go through this process to gain insight into their personal professional development.