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Placement Learning and Reflection Week 2 Level 4 to level 5: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Address all aspects of the brief Identify all key issues Analysis of materials Critical and analytical line of argument Connections between paragraphs Background reading From descriptive to critical

Tips: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Plan early Write assignment titles down to refer to Fully analyse essay question Use a range of resources Identify topic, purpose, and structure of essay Consider quality of evidence and argument you have read Identify key positive and negative aspects you can comment on Assess relevance and usefulness of sources to debate that you are engaging in for your assignment

Basic essay structure 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction – statement of intent Main body of essay Informed, reasoned conclusion – no new information/sources Reference list

Week 3 - Lecture

Week 3 - Seminar

Glazzard, Jonathan; Stones, Samual. The ITT Core Content Framework: What Trainee Primary School Teachers Need to Know. Learning Matters.

Ghaye, T. (2010) Chapter 3 Some Views of the Nature of Reflection-on-practice in Ghaye, T. (2010) Teaching and Learning through Reflective Practice: A Practical Guide for Positive Action. Pages 36 – 47 Key Words

          

People (teachers, children, and significant others); Action (that is intentional, there is a purpose to it); Context (this is where the action takes place and occurs over time; there are other ideas associated with context which will be discussed later); Accounting for ourselves (this has both a personal and professional dimension); Experience (what we have done and lived through – we refect on this experience);Disposition (as a way of approaching the art of teaching); Dialogue (the different types of talk that goes on between teachers and their children, children and other children, teachers, and teachers, and so on); Sense- making and decoding (this is where we use our powers of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation to try to enhance our understanding of learning and teaching); Construction (the process of building meanings in order to help us to act in competent and ethical ways); Reflective turns (re- seeing, re- viewing, and re- searching what it is we do in order to develop a more holistic view of things); Empowerment (positive feelings and a developed set of values that enable us to take wise and appropriate professional action); Theories (those things which we personally develop, or draw upon, from the work of others, that help to explain what we do).

Practices of refection Principle 1 

Refective practice needs to be understood as a discourse (Fairclough 1998). A discourse can be understood as a set of meanings, statements, stories, and so on which produce a particular version of events. The refective discourse, or conversation as we can call it in this book, is at the heart of the improvement process. Sometimes this conversation has the potential to disturb our professional identity and those things which give our teaching its shape, form, and purpose. How can we ever claim to be able to consider doing something better if we are not prepared to be disturbed? Additionally, it is worth reminding ourselves that certain types of refective conversation can disturb the status quo by questioning and challenging it. Developing and sustaining refective conversations inside and between organizations, through the use of modern technologies, is fundamental to knowledge- sharing and knowledge management.

Principle 2 

Refective practice is fuelled and energized by experience (Weil and McGill 1990, Boud and Miller 1996, Boud et al. 1997). We have to refect on something, and that something is our experience and all those things that it comprises. Most often, our nat-ural default position is to refect on those aspects of our work, or those encounters in the workplace, that are problematic, troublesome, and unfulfilling in some way. But it does not have to be like this. We can refect upon successes, try to get to the root causes of them, and then plan how to amplify them. We can use the practices of refection to get an answer to the question, ‘what do I/we want more of (success), rather than less of (problems)?’ Things such as planning for learning, assessment and recording, learner management, teaching styles and strategies, and how teaching in the classroom is infuenced by what is going on outside or at governors’ and

parents’ meetings, from OFSTED inspection agendas and changes in National Curriculum policy. Refection- on-practice takes experience, and interrogates it in particular ways. Principle 3 

Refective practice is a process that involves a refective turn. This means returning to look again at all our taken- for-granted values, professional understandings, and practices. This focus on routines, rituals, on everyday occurrences that make up the bulk of a working day, is most important. Refecting on practice is not about refecting only on the extraordinary, the exceptional and the ‘one- off ’. In this ‘turn’, we can refect on ourselves and the part we played in the particular practice incident. We can also think about the parts played by the significant others involved. In refecting on ourselves and others, we are likely also to deepen our understanding of what it is we are looking at in terms of the practice incident itself. For example, we might understand more deeply incidents to do with managing challenging behaviour, differentiating work to suit a range of pupil abilities, and appropriate monitoring and recording of pupil progress.

Principle 4 

Refective practice is concerned with learning how to account for ourselves. This means learning how to describe, explain and justify our teaching. This is particularly important in the context of inspection, in the context of blame cultures and the need to be a socially responsible organization. It is important where both individual and collect-ive teacher strengths and weaknesses are observed, and where practice is questioned. Part and parcel of being a professional means being able to account for one’s practice.

Principle 5 

Refective practice can be understood as a disposition to inquiry. It is not just a collec-tion of methods for eliciting evidence about practice. It is not a toolbox that consists of things such as critical incident analysis proformas, and guidelines on how to keep learn-ing journals and conduct school experience debriefs. These are important, but should be seen as part of the bigger refective process. Methods and a sound rationale for their use need to be developed. A rationale can be constructed if evidence- gathering methods are employed to serve more than short- term technical ends. This book tries to set out a powerful rationale for refective practice that centres upon the idea of ‘refection as a disposition to enquiry.’ The characteristics of this disposition are most often viewed as arriving at the present day via the work of John Dewey and Donald Schön. Having a disposition means that we view teaching and learning through refective lenses, that we question it, look into it systematically, and continuously strive to learn from it. The overriding goal is to improve the quality of the educational relationships in each class-room, school, and other learning environment. Clearly, then, we do need some kind of toolbox, or set of evidence- gathering methods, that works for us in the busy and com-plex worlds of classrooms, schools, colleges, universities and other learning environ-ments. But we should be wary of those who reduce refection to a set of techniques to be learnt and then applied to practice. Refection- on-practice is about a whole way of seeing and being. It is about having a commitment to the development of a particular

professional mindset that enables us to make even wiser and more ethical professional judgements. Principle 6 

Refective practice is interest- serving. When we refect, we are engaging in a process of knowledge creation. If we are committed to educational improvement, then, by impli-cation, we are also committed to actually doing something positive and constructive with the knowledge that we create. We need to put the knowledge to work to achieve some desired and justifiable state. So we can argue that we do not simply refect on what we do, but that we do so with certain purposes or interests in mind that need to be served. Different kinds of interest are served by the way we create and use this knowledge – for, example, the interests may be personal, professional, political and social. It is very important that we sort out in our minds what interests might (or actu-ally will) be served through the refective process.

Principle 7 

Refective practice is enacted by those who are critical thinkers (Barnett 1997). This can lead to personal and collective improvement through critical forms of refective practice. Critical refection- on-practice is essentially where educators acquire a lan-guage, a set of arguments, the skilfulness and power to transform the existing order of things, so as to improve the quality of learner’s educational experiences. A critical form of refection- on-practice can enable and empower educators to act in this way. Cen-tral to being critical is the ability to ask probing and challenging questions about what we do. These are often ‘why-type’ questions. Why do I teach like this? Why did I do it that way? Why has my teaching come to be the way it is? Why do I feel unable to live out my professional values in my everyday teaching? But, as I mentioned earlier, these need to be balanced by other types of question, especially howtype ones. Brookfield emphasizes the importance of this principle when he says, ‘Being a critical thinker is part of what it means to be a developing person. . . . Without critical think-ing . . . our workplaces remain organized as they were twenty years ago’ (Brookfield 1995:1).

Principle 8 

Refective practice is a way of decoding a symbolic landscape. Our everyday taken- for-granted worlds of teaching and learning, of schools, classrooms and other educational establishments, are symbolic landscapes. The symbolism is there for us to decode in every aspect of the environment in which teaching and learning takes place – for exam-ple, in the way classroom furniture is arranged, in the way modern technologies convey information, in what is displayed inside the school, in how people relate to each other, in what is rewarded, recorded and signified as being worthy. These symbols often go together to make up that phenomenon which is often called school culture. This is multi- layered, multi- faceted, and a significant infuence on the quality of the learning environment. The symbols await professional decoding. Refecting on practice helps us to discern the significance of this symbolism.

Principle 9



Refective practice sits at the interface between notions of practice and theory. Refec-tive practitioners have a particular view of these two ideas. Through systematic and rig-orous kinds of refection- on-practice, educators are able to construct meaningful theories- of-action which are in a ‘living’ form (Whitehead 1993). They are ‘living’ in the sense that they are made up of refective conversations and actual teaching episodes, created through retrospective thinking about practice and the public validation of accounts of it. Refection- on-practice links the account (the ‘theory’) and the practice (teaching). Linking the two is a creative process.

Principle 10 

Refective practice occupies a position at the confuence or intersection of a number of ways of knowing. Postmodernism is the broad landscape within which this confuence is positioned. A postmodern way of knowing, namely social constructionism, provides some of the bedrock upon which this landscape is shaped (Burr 1995, Fosnot 1996). This important way of knowing helps refective practitioners to construct understand-ings of the educative potency of their teaching, and helps them to interpret human action.

Becoming an educator and teaching in a confident, competent, creative and ethical manner is a challenging and complex learning process. Central to this process is our ability to refect constructively, creatively and critically on our teaching intentions, the ends we have in mind, and the means we might use to achieve them. The refective conversation is a medium through which we are able to learn from our educational experiences, and question the educational values that give a shape, form and purpose to what we do. This focus on values is the fundamental characteristic of a refective con-versation. It is one where educators interrogate, question and re- interpret the values that guide what they do, in the context in which they find themselves teaching. With-out this quality, arguably, the conversation is not truly refective but something else – for example, a conversation that is more technically focused. Just as some argue that not all thinking about teaching is refective if there is no questioning of goals and values (Zeichner and Liston 1996:1), I would say that it is important to make an early distinc-tion between what does or does not constitute a refective conversation. Above all else, a refective conversation is one that involves a discussion of values. A focus on values is at the heart of the personal and collective improvement process. Learning through refective practice is centrally about acknowledging the impor-tance of working with experience – both positive and more difficult (or negative) experiences. In acknowledging this, we should be cautious of simply giving primacy to experience without taking into account the context in which, and through which, the experience has come about. Teaching experience should not be celebrated uncritically. In a refective conversation it is important for the ‘signi-ficant other’ to affirm the student teacher’s voice, for example, while simultan-eously encouraging the interrogation of such a voice. Teaching experiences can be distorted, self- fulfilling, liberating, suffocating, and so on. Simply having experi-ences to recount does not imply that they are refected upon. They may be poorly understood and thought about uncritically. The bottom line is that a refective conversation publicly demonstrates a preparedness to be open about the learning that arises from the experience of teaching. It also demonstrates a professional obli-gation to continue to develop one’s practical knowledge. Through conversations of the kind I am suggesting, future teaching possibilities

are potentially opened up to us, biases and blind spots can be detected and addressed, and the whole ‘value- ladenness’ of the practice of teaching examined....