We are all striving to be better teachers – if that process is enhanced by reflective practice then let’s do it! According to Finlay (2009) reflective practice involves “learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self and/or practices”. It involves examination of assumptions, self-awareness, critical evaluation and life-long learning. Sounds good, is it worth the time?….In his video, Phillip Dawson states that research shows that reflective practices lead to deep understanding, improve self-assessment and are most effective when shared. Research has NOT shown that reflective practices necessarily produce better self-understanding or better outcomes for students. Let’s follow his advice to make our reflections short, shared, structured and scholarly, and let’s re-evaluate if we are not helping to improve student outcomes.
Reference: Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c128/691f2615de873dfe544fcb5dc902fe812675.pdf
This is an interesting point Marian, to make our reflections short and shared. I am co-teaching and we meet once a week to plan for the week. I'm trying to find ways to critically evaluate our practice together to find out if what we're doing is making a difference at all to our learners. The word structured makes me think I could support these discussions with a kind of framework? Have you come across anything?
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