By Heather Fitzgerald, Ki Wight, Micaela Kwiatkowski
We are at the time in the semester when it is hard to see the forest for the trees – especially since it often feels like you are navigating those trees at high speed! For this month’s blog post, we thought it might be helpful to focus on reflection as a practice that can help us rise above the tree canopy to get a bit more of a bird’s eye view of our teaching practice.
Reflection often feels like a luxury we can’t afford in our busy teaching lives. By the time a term is coming to an end, we are often panting over the finish line and the last thing we want to do is circle back to consider how we got here. But reflection is a critical tool to give us a fuller picture of our teaching and its effects on students. More than that, reflection can help us understand who we are as teachers and who we want to be(come).
Why Reflection?
We all reflect on our experiences in some ways: when we walk out of class thinking “well, that went better than I hoped,” or “that activity didn’t exactly work” we are engaging in a form of reflection. But for reflection to contribute to learning, we need to go deeper than what happened to consider why it might have happened and what we might do differently in future. Starting with John Dewey in the 1930s, educational theorists have long identified structured reflection as critical to learning from experience (see David Kolb’s reflective cycle as one well-known example).
More recent education scholars argue for the importance and value of reflection to help teachers understand how power operates in the classroom and the institution (Brookfield, 2017) and to situate our teaching within critical, social and ethical contexts (Ashton and Noonan, 2013). Dr. Candyce Reynolds, in a recent keynote address, describes reflection as a “durable skill” for learning from experience (that is, one that lasts seven years or longer) that can easily develop into a lifelong practice.
How to Build a Reflective Practice
There are so many ways to approach reflection on teaching that it can seem overwhelming. Educators have written full books on the topic! But building a reflective practice does not need to be complicated. Honestly, the biggest hurdles to overcome are 1) committing to the practice, and 2) setting aside the time. If you are new to reflection, here are some ideas to get you started, but feel free to experiment, create, or investigate other options: we link to a few well-structured resources below.
End-of-term reflection
This one is the simplest practice because you only need to set aside time once! At the end of term, gather all your course notes and materials and set aside an hour or two to review them with the following questions in mind:
- what went well with this course? Was there a particular lesson plan / activity / assignment that stood out as really successful?
- what didn’t go the way I planned or didn’t work out the way I hoped? and how did this affect student learning?
- what did I hear or see from students during the course? where did they seem to be most excited, disengaged, challenged, or frustrated?
- based on the above, is there anything I might want to change or adjust for the future?
This is a variation on the What? So what? What now? model of reflection. As a second step, you can also incorporate student feedback from your course evaluations into this review.
Weekly Reflection
This one is also easy because you jot down your notes and ideas immediately after each class. Using a journal, notes app, or voice memo, take 10-15 minutes each week to document what happened in class, why things might have happened that way, and what you learned from the experience.
This is a variation of the DEAL model of reflection (describe, examine, articulate learning) and can give you lots of great information for an end-of-term reflection or revising the class.
Build a teaching community
One of the most natural ways to reflect on teaching is to do so in conversation with other instructors. Teaching communities of practice, informal faculty meetup groups, or just regular coffee with trusted colleagues can all provide an opportunity to review what’s working well in your teaching and what maybe isn’t going the way you hoped. In addition to giving you a space to reflect, you get the added benefit of other people’s experience and ideas to help you brainstorm. If you feel awkward discussing teaching wins and challenges with peers, your colleagues in the teaching and learning centre can be another sounding board.
Gather student feedback
This one can be more time-consuming to set up and a little uncomfortable (because feedback is hard), but it can also generate incredibly valuable information. The goal is to ask students for their quick formative feedback on lessons, activities or assignments regularly throughout the class to check your assumptions on what’s happening in the class. These can be very simple such as:
surveys asking students to describe their experience and make any suggestions for changes or improvements (e.g. what is working well for you? what could work better?)
- ticket out the door activities asking students to write one thing they learned and one thing they would still like to learn
- temperature check activities that ask students how they are feeling about a particular aspect of the class
- in-class discussions or online forums asking students for a “glow” (what is working well) and a “grow” (what could be improved)
- Post-it exercise asking students to add ideas to each of three categories: classroom practices to keep, start, or stop.
Developing a reflective practice in teaching takes time—our most precious commodity—but it pays off in so many ways: from increased confidence in the classroom to more engaged students and more efficient course planning. As we become more aware of why we do what we do in our classrooms and curriculum, we are better able to communicate that clear purpose to our students, which in turn makes our jobs easier. And it’s never too late to start a structured reflective practice: even if you can only manage the simplest form of reviewing and reflecting on this past term, you will gain a powerful tool in your teaching toolkit – one that might just become a lifelong habit!
Further Resources
https://umanitoba.ca/centre-advancement-teaching-learning/support/reflective-teaching
https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/ReflectiveTeaching
Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.) by Stephen Brookfield (2017).
Cultural work and higher education by Daniel Ashton and Catriona Noonan (2013).