Reflective Practice

The challenges of teaching include classroom management issues, lack of time, and the constraints of policy and standards. In response to these challenges, making time to reflect on my teaching practice and curriculum is very important. It's important to connect my artistic self to my teaching self.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”- John Dewey

Teacher reflection is important because it’s a process that helps teachers to collect, record, and analyse everything that happened in the lesson. It allows teachers to move from just experiencing, into understanding. If they don’t question themselves about what their experiences mean and think actively about them, research has shown that they won’t make any changes and therefore improve.

This page will show you different modes of reflective practice I use in my teaching practice.

Brookfield's 4 lenses

Here you can view an example of the weekly reflections I did during my school placements. I used Brookfield's four lenses as I responded to a focus topic, which was very helpful and enabled me to learn and grow in my practice.

Lesson Evaluations

View one of my post lesson reflective evaluations. It became common practice to complete one of these following every lessons.

Reflective Diary

I used a reflective journal throughout both my placements. You can view an excerpt from my journal here. I found it very helpful to record my observations during and after lessons.

Padlet

Padlet is an educational collaborative web platform in which users can upload, organize, and share content to virtual bulletin boards. I used it to reflect on my teaching and planning. I have provided copies of my reflective visual boards here rather than web links.