Reflection in / on Learning and Teaching
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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! (I always picture this scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.) 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.
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!