Week 17: My Reflective Practice Using Jay and Johnson’s reflective model (2002)

My Reflective Practice Using Jay and Johnson’s reflective model (2002)

1.     Descriptive:

Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough but because they can do better.” Dylan William

I reflect as I teach my students and write notes on planning and in modelling books when time allows.

I reflect on the lessons and critique what works well and ask myself what can I take out.

I am continually thinking; How did my students react to the tasks, did they fit the learning outcomes, did they progress.

I use this information to plan for the next week’s lessons.

I use a teaching as Inquiry spirals to make improvements for my student’s outcomes and my own practice. Target groups look at how Maori learn but I find this incredibly difficult to apply and need to make it a separate area of inquiry in my practice.

I discuss how our programme is working for students with my two co teachers on the fly. This should improve once they work the whole day rather than half days.

I reflect throughout the term on appraisal goals which are at the forefront of weekly planning and make entries in my professional learning journal as I see fit.

I critically reflect on the initiative from my study with The Mind Lab is improving outcomes for my students, which has given me a big picture overview of what needs to change.

I am feeling like communication between all needs to have more quality time.  

“For busy professionals short on time, reflective practice is all too easily applied in bland, mechanical, unthinking ways.” Findlay (2008).  I feel I never switch off thinking about how my teaching and the students learning is going which blurs specific action being taken as I “sift through the hum of everything I take in.”

2.    Comparative:

Reflection tends to make me feel like I’m not good enough and therefore failing my students. However reflection of Dylan William’s video clip he talked about never finishing the job of teaching because there is always something to learn rang true for me and made me realise we all feel this way if we are passionate about what we do.

We need to look at a more lean approach Womack, (2006, to cut out the inefficiencies or muda that can always be found in favour of beginning the move towards quality reflection time.

As a staff we need to increase efficiency of meetings and create time for reflections. We had a 10 minute reflection writing against the professional standards at the beginning of staff meetings where we could share the reflection for input from others. This could be resurrected. We also have a wide variation of what reflection looks like.

Making a more concentrated effort to claim back time from unnecessary reflection will make a difference to all. Larrivee (2000) p.293 confirms this idea saying “unless teachers develop the practice of critical reflection, they stay trapped in unexamined judgements, interpretations, assumptions and expectations. Approaching teaching as a reflective practitioner involves fusing personal beliefs and values into a professional identity.

3.    Critical Reflection:

“Maybe reflective practices offer us a way of trying to make sense of the uncertainty in our workplaces and the courage to work competently and ethically at the edge of order and chaos…” (Ghaye, 2000, p.7), as cited in Findlay (2008).

By adopting a lean approach to reflection I will analyse what is useful and what is unnecessary I will try to look at the whole picture with my co teachers so we can develop a stronger reflective practices.

An inquiry we are currently collaboratively working on could be model  used.

Using Larrivee’s (2008), thoughts about fusing my own beliefs and values into who I am as a practitioner needs careful thought on how this impacts on the beliefs and values of the students I teach and also how this links to what underpins my pedagogy.

My participation in Mind Lab has led me to reflect deeply on what my own philosophy is and who or what I base this on. It has also led me to other styles and beliefs which ring true to my own pedagogy. This has given me an added confidence to explore through reflection, what I am doing and change it up for the better.  

References:

Finlay, L. (2008). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file/ecms/web-content/Finlay-%282008%29-Reflecting-on-reflective-practice-PBPL-paper-52.pdf

Jay, J.,& Johnson, K. (2002). Capturing complexity: A typography of reflective practice for education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(1), 73-85.

Larrivee, B. (2000).Transforming teaching practice: becoming the critically reflective teacher. Reflective Practice, 1(3), 293-307. 

William, D. Video: Teacher Reflective Practice. Retrieved from https://app.themindlab.com/media/79182/view.

Womack, J.P. (2006). Lean Thinking for Education. Paper Presented at the 2006 Lean Educator Conference, Worcester, MA.