Week 17 / My Reflective Practice



I will be using Jay and Johnsons reflective model to support this weeks reflective journal post.
Description:
At the moment my reflective practice consists of 4 levels of reflection.
1) Personal reflection on a daily basis where I reflect to myself in my head on my teaching and
how it went after each lesson. I ask myself how that lesson went, did the children understand this,
did I get across my intention from the lesson? I then look at what I need to do for the next lesson,
if it went well then I go to the next lesson I have planned but if it didn’t go so well I either have to
repeat the lesson or change aspects of it to get the desired result that I had planned for.
2) Daily conversation with my colleague on how things went and what we can do to improve things
or offer suggestions to help each other on improving our teaching to support the achievement of our
children.
3) Team meetings every 2 weeks where we discuss what is happening in our classrooms and offer
suggestions to each other to help improve student achievement.
4) Once (or if lucky twice) a term where I look at my inquiry and write down my reflections answering
questions based on the spiral of inquiry theory.
I feel that the discussions have been helpful as others can offer ideas that I do not think about. It has
been helpful to others to have these discussions for the same reason and it has helped in my leading
my team to offer these discussion sessions.
I get frustrated with having to put everything in writing as this makes this a longer process and then
we have no time to discuss other issues within our team.
Comparative:
I believe that to have a truly effective reflective practice you must have a growth mindset and you
must be open to critique and constructive criticism. According to Zeicher and Liston (1996) my
reflective practice consistently uses the first 3 of his 5 levels of reflection.
1. rapid reflection - immediate, ongoing and automatic action by the teacher.
2. repair - in which a thoughtful teacher makes decisions to alter their behaviour in response to
students’ cues
3. review - when a teacher thinks about, discusses or writes about some elements of their teaching.
4.  research - when a teacher engages in ore systematic and sustained thinking over time, perhaps
by collecting data and reading research.
5. retheorizing and reformulating - the process by which a teacher critically examines their own
practice and theories in the light of academic theories.
While I base my inquiry focus on data and as a team we discuss the results of the data to see what
the needs are, and at times I have researched information to support the best practice for addressing
these needs. I have not actively sought theories to support my focus or the focus of those in my team.
I believe this is something that I need to address and do more readily.


Critical reflection:
Larrivee (2000) states that teachers now-a-days need to have more self-awareness, self-inquiry,
and self-reflection in order to make a difference in the children’s learning and achievement. While
this seems good in theory, with this comes time constraints. Our profession already takes up a huge
amount of time without my having to actively go and research articles to back-up my hunches.


Questions:
SO I ask you to comment on the following:
Where do we find the time to do this?
Is our profession (teaching) becoming to overloaded and too stressful?


How does everyone else cope with this workload?


REFERENCES:
Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002). Capturing complexity: a typology of reflective practice for
teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85.

Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. Practice-based Professional Learning Centre,
Open University. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/sites/www.open.ac.uk.opencetl/
files/files/ecms/web-content/Finlay-(2008)-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf

Larrivee, B. (2000).Transforming teaching practice: becoming the critically reflective teacher.
Reflective Practice, 1(3), 293-307.

Zeichner, K.M. And Liston, D.P. (1996) Reflective Teaching: An Introduction. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates Publishers.


Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 30, 2018 at 11:10 PM

    I like the ways that you currently reflect on your practice. I can also see that like me researching into current theories is something that you are working on to make sure your teaching and learning practice is still best practice. As for finding time - my suggestion is to set aside a regular time to reflect just once a week to begin with and then see how this impacts on your teaching and learning.

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