After reading the J. John Loughran article on effective reflective practice, It made me feel quite positive about how reflective I actually am and how important it is in my day-to-day teaching. “…learning through questioning and investigation…” is something I think I do to my teaching and the pupils learning. I often find myself questioning pupils on how well they understood, could I clarify further, is there any particular technique—. I also question and investigate some areas of course to my colleagues. I am learning about my teaching by questioning and investigation before deciding on what is my next step and the method of delivery accordingly. Through critical reflection I have evolved myself as a confident informed teacher and learner in the past 8 years by teaching in inner London and now in Scotland though my cultural and educational background is all different.
Less teacher talk, more listening 
An area I would like to address in chapter 5 of the Hattie paper “..the portion of student talk to teacher talk”. I don’t think I always have the right balance when it comes to teacher talk as it can feel in some lessons that I talk too much. I believe we can get so caught up on ensuring that we are covering the mandatory course coverage that at times it take over the lesson simply imparting information. I need to take a step back and listen more. Hattie states “…the more the instruction was challenging, relevant, and engaging, the less likely teachers were talking”. This is something I think I would like to start to consider more.
Rachna, quite a few secondary teachers have picked up on the ‘teacher talk’ part of the Hattie paper. What do you feel the role of teacher talk should be in the classroom? And you mention three quite different educational experiences: your own, inner London and Scotland. What do you think the biggest differences were among these three and are there any surprising similarities?
To me a teacher should have an opening and concluding talk,time in between should be the pupils learning from their own experiences.But this always not the case.Most of the time teacher takes lead in the class in terms of talking.I agree few parts of the topic are theoretical and teacher led but there are plenty of techniques that can be adopted for other parts of the course to promote coop learning in the class. Inner London schools have at least 30-33 pupils in each group whereas in Scotland we teach maximum up to 20 pupils in a science lab.Less number of pupils,less stress.But at the same time salary structure in Inner England schools is much higher than in Scotland.Teaching commitment remains same irrespective of place.Personally I learnt a lot from my own experiences and of course from other’s experiences.I am a keen observer and learner.
Thanks Rachna