Week 17 Reflective Practice

Week 17 
Reflective Practice

Fig 1.

I will be using the Jay and Johnson's model of reflective practice to go through my thoughts on this.

Descriptive

Before I became a teacher I designed and made wedding gowns and I had to finish the job to perfection. I reflected on producing a product, the inanimate outcome, which had to be fit for purpose and had to be right. This has stayed with me as a teacher and to make sure I do the job properly is a big responsibility and one that leads to much critical reflection. I think I use the five levels of reflection that Zeichner and Liston (1996) suggest of, Rapid reflection - Repair - Review - Research – Re-theorizing and reformulating, work with animated human beings with all the delights and complications they bring to my teaching practice.

Over the years of teaching Technology as a subject, the outcome of the product is the focus of the design thinking. I have to teach the critical evaluative tool my students use to reflect in and reflect on their design process.

Comparative

As Findlay (2002 p.13 ) says about mentoring learners that sometimes "mentors in clinical practice rarely facilitated reflective learning activities with students" and that the failure "could relate to mentors’ own difficulties with the process."

 I have found that because I teach scholarship I have had to overcome my own difficulties to understand the process myself to enable this reflective practice to be taught successfully to the students.

 Findlay(2002 p.13) goes on to cite Loughran (2000) in which she says "helping novices to see differently is best done through practical and practice experiences; it is not simply a question of the educator telling them what they should see or know. Instead, the educator needs to help students do their own analysis and meaning-making." This is a thinking process I have simplified for the students to grasp, like Gibbs reflective cycle:

Fig 2

We discuss the writing of the reflective journal during and after the process of design and construction. 

This meaning-making has been helped enormously by talking through the cycle with other technology teachers who have been teaching in their own fields of specialisation, and in doing so we have found there is a common thread to enable the process to be taught successfully. Researching the best reflective model has allowed us to help the students and ourselves to frame and label the specific ways to capture the thoughts and feelings as the students have worked through their projects.

Critical reflection

Findlay cites Hobbs, (2007); Griffin, (2003); Burrows, (1995) who individually comment that "learners need to be developmentally ready to engage in critical reflection and that some individuals may be incapable of doing so."

Students going through the design process who are not able to genuinely reflect is the difference between those students who can write a good critical report and gain scholarship and those who fail. I have found that even though I can teach the steps the students have to see the way themselves.

 When they are ready to honestly write up their thoughts, feelings, successes and failures, though, it is wonderful to read how they have created their own design process to produce an amazing product.  To see, too, that they have grown in maturity and the thinking capacity so needed for tertiary education and their future working life, provides the satisfaction that the job has been done too!

For those who don’t manage to do this, then this leads back to Zeichner and Liston’s (1996) model of reflective practice in my own teaching, going through steps 3- review, 4- research and 5- re-theorise to reflect on how to do better next time.

References:

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

Gibbs, G (1988) Learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. Oxford: Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic. Fig 2

Hobbs, (2007); Griffin, (2003); Burrows, (1995) cited in 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

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  Fig 1.

Loughran, J.J. (2000) Effective Reflective practice, A paper presented at Making a difference through Reflective practices: values and Actions conference. University College of Worcester, July 2000.

Zeichner, K. MDiagram., & Liston, D. P. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum