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?"
No comments:
Post a Comment