Tag: reflection

Guidance for Educators: Post-session reflection

Guidance to Educators: Reflecting after sessions

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Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with colleagues. If you think they’ll find it of interest. 

Let’s talk today about how you handle a session that doesn’t go so well. Any problems that crop up can be quite demoralizing. Sometimes you walk out of a session thinking either I dropped the ball or the students didn’t respond. Something just didn’t work in any given session. 

Now not every session is going to go well. It could be something you have failed to plan for, it may be that you misjudged the receptivity of the students. It may be that they just were very resistant to what it was you’re asking them to engage with in the session and how you manage that system dynamic is obviously very problematic.

So after any session, educators really need to sit back and reflect if it, even if it just takes a few minutes, even if they’re just doing it in their heads, they need to be thinking about what went well, what didn’t go so well. If it doesn’t go well, there’s a particular problem in any given session, it’s a really good idea to journal it, write something down, even just a few notes on the back of your notes are fine, but to write something down as soon as possible after the session. To discuss it with colleagues, just to literally go back to the, whatever the virtual coffee room is, or the staff room and talk to your colleagues about why something didn’t go well and be open about that. You won’t be judged for it if you’re honest about it. 

And thirdly, to reflect, and how deeply you reflect will depend a little bit on whether it was a serious issue or, or relatively minor issue. You maybe want to think about, from a positive perspective what you would do differently if you had it again.

And if you were faced with those similar circumstances in the future, how you might plan to do it differently. So it’s really important that you do reflect at some level, either using notes, conversation or indeed just thinking about it. I always try and make some notes after a session, particularly if it hasn’t gone well, but even if it’s gone well, I might want to make a note as to why I think it might’ve gone well.

I think it’s really important, and I would encourage you to do that. So do try something like that, try something similar. 

Let me know how it goes. Be well.

Reflective Practice: a non-negotiable requirement for an effective educator

"Young Male Wearing Winter Cap" by imagerymajestic
imagerymajestic@freedigitalphotos.net

BPP colleague John Irving has taught me a great deal about reflection, self-coaching and self-observation since I joined BPP University College in the summer of 2011.

John has a way of looking at educational context which is still alien to me but hugely challenging. I think we all want to work with people who stretch us and challenge us and I’m often frustrated at the lack of thought leadership around me. So it’s been a delight in recent months, as John and I embarked on a third module in our pilot PGCert programme, to write an overview of reflective practice together and explore the implications of reflection for educators, particularly in professional education. That produced a short paper.

It is very much a case of standing on the shoulders of giants in this paper, part our own reflection, part literature review, it identifies the very personal characteristics of reflective practice and the importance of emotion in that process. It explores the nature of reflection served by solitary deliberation and engagement in communities of practice and identifies the individual attributes of reflection as defined by Schön and Brookfield.

Finally, this paper provides a review of several reflective models and suggests that personal transformation and reflective practice must form the basis for effective teaching. We’ve found Brookfield’s four critical lenses a very effective way to contextualise and plan our academic development support and this paper fits nicely for us into a growing body of resource to encourage faculty to embrace the change! The paper is available for download here: Reflective Practice Mar 2013 Atkinson.

Sequencing, pause, reflection and action in learning materials

The mismatch or disjuncture in the authoring process for Word and the online learning delivery environment. We may NOT want academic staff authoring content direct into the VLE, but we need them close enough to the delivery context to understand the issues of sequencing, pause, reflection and action.

Working this week with a variety of practical tools to develop learning content and thinking seriously about how they are structured, internally referenced, and where the opportunities for scaffolding professional development within them might be. This seems easiest at first glance with the Frontpage eXe editing tool which creates reasonable XHTML code and has a variety of expert options including IMS/SCORM packages that work fine in Moodle at least. However, it raises some really interesting questions about ‘how’, in practice, most academic staff actually build the materials they use in their teaching. Here I’ve been dealing with content written in word and passed to an administrative member of staff who has ‘transferred’ it into eXe. There are clear issues with awful Mso code being imported which is tiresome to get rid of.

More interesting is perhaps the mismatch or disjuncture in the authoring process for Word than for the delivery environment. We may NOT want academic staff authoring content directly into the VLE, but we need them close enough to the delivery context to understand the issues of sequencing, pause, reflection and action. The argument might be for the development of a more structured ‘template’ for each authoring environment, and indeed the professional conversation with authoring teams around the development of a template would in itself prove valuable. My own development of these MS-Word-> eXe materials for one specific undergraduate course makes me think there must be a better way. Just need more time to think about what it might be.

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