EDU406 Final Term Handouts

Reflective Teaching Practices: Criticality

Framing Reflection in External Constraints

• RP does not take place in a vacuum
• It occurs complicated social field with competing habits and constraints that naturally affect teachers in the school environment.

Reflective teaching practices needs to be very critical if they need to be effective and what we want to do is look at different aspects of criticality in terms of reflective practice. One critical aspect of reflection of reflective practice is that we need to be aware of is that reflection does not happen in isolation. It happens within an external framework within an environment. Therefore, being critical about reflective practice means that we need to understand the environment and how those external constraints can affect the reflective practitioner and affect the outcomes of reflective practice.

Reflection with Action

The role the teacher plays within their schools and departments will have an effect on the reflective practice of the teacher.

• There will be certain rules of being a teacher, both written and unwritten, they will constrain or bias the reflective practice that occurs.
• Teacher do not exist in a vacuum: all their experiences are different because of the school environment they exist in the colleagues they work with and their own habits they bring to their education are all different
• The colleagues they work with and their own habits they bring to their education are all different.

It’s the colleagues that we work with, it’s the biases we have, the expectations and biases that our colleagues have which come together in the environment which create the reflective practice environment. These actually become constraints or also they can become empowerees to the process of reflection.

• To understand teachers’ reflective practice there must be an understanding of the social environment they exist in.

Reflective Teaching Practices: Criticality Critical Reflection= Critical Thinking

Critical Reflection and Critical Thinking

• Models of thinking and reflection involve three fundamental processes

Retrospection

• Thinking back about a situation or experience

Self-Evaluation

• Critically analyzing and evaluating the actions and feeling associated with the experience, using

theoretical perspectives.

The next level of critical thinking is self-evaluation. For the reflective practitioner it is important to think analytically and in evaluative terms about experiences. Critical evaluation and analysis of our actions and also of the feelings that we have, our responses to experiences we have. It’s important to understand all of these from theoretical academic perspectives and begin to make cognitive links in the conceptual frames.

Re-Orientation

• Using the results of self-evaluation to influence future approaches to similar situations and experience.
• Part of critically is to transform problems into constructive ideas

Critical Reflection Analysis

• Try to translate the processes of reflection into questions that challenging you further.

➢ Did the analysis look broadly enough? ➢ Is the issue recognized by students ➢ Does the improvement proposal address the original issue? ➢ Is the analysis and improvement specific enough?

Critical Reflective Enquiry: Critical Philosophy

Critical Philosophy

• From the critical philosophy perspective teaching practice is viewed as a form of social life in which different forms of domination, distortions an misunderstanding are possible.

Becoming reflective practitioner is important in terms of the processes that you engage with from a sort of research perspective in the classroom and what we can consider is Critical Reflective Enquiry in this regard an underpinning idea in relation to the reflective practitioner experimenting, investigating and developing from those investigations is to understand the philosophical underpinnings to reflection and criticality and in this regard we can talk about criticality philosophy or in other words the perspective of teaching that we hold and view as important and we as reflective practitioner can alter the experience of classroom, alter the perception of issues and problems as they arise and therefore the certain distortions and the effects that the philosophy we have can have on our critical reflection. Hence any study of practice needs to incorporate an emancipatory focus through which social life can be freed from domination and distortions (Herbermas, 1984)