Monthly Archives: November 2015

Reflecting on Reflection

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Reflection is a process in which you look back at a certain event or piece of work and examine it in a critical way. By reflecting on such things you are able process your thoughts and feelings about the incident or piece of work and use these thoughts to learn how to do better in the future.

Reflecting on a past experience can be very beneficial as it allows you to look back at the event and identify the errors that occurred. You can reflect on how they affected you, how it changed you as a person and how it could have affected other people. But it also allows you to learn from the previous experience and use that knowledge in the future to avoid making the same mistakes. Reflection can also be used to evaluate a piece of writing. You are able to identify the weaknesses in your work and what you need to improve on. Using this knowledge you are able to improve your writing skills and avoid making the same mistakes in a future piece.

Reflection does not just need to be used to point out the negatives. It can also be used to highlight the positives in your work or event. It enables you to see your strengths and what parts of your work you did well. Just like the negatives, you can remember what you did well and use it again in the future.

Reflecting on feedback is also an important part of learning and has many benefits. It allows you to identify what you need to work on and how you can improve your work.  Having an outside opinion on your work enables you to see a different perspective that you may not have thought of before and gives you ideas of how you could integrate this new information into your future work. It is important to reflect on the positive feedback that you receive as well as it highlights what other people think you do successfully and give you a confidence boost.

In my opinion, reflecting is crucial to your learning. Not only does it allow you to see what you have done well in but what you can improve on and therefore you are constantly improving you skills.

 

What it Means to be an Enquiring Practitioner

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Being an enquiring practitioner requires much more than being able to learn the skills and methods of enquiry. As a teacher, to be a enquiring practitioner you need to be able to develop your ideas and knowledge of teaching. Be able to question and challenge new ideas which will allow you to continuously develop and learn. An enquiring practitioner is one who can learn from critical research and is constantly adapting their teaching ways. This way they can put these new skills into practice in the classroom and again learn from experience what works well and not so well. It is also important for an enquiring practitioner to be flexible; they must be adaptive and open to change.

Being an enquiring practitioner has benefits and challenges. Firstly, it gives teachers a useful way to monitor their own practice. By constantly challenging themselves and asking critical questions such as: ” What is the purpose of this?”, ” What impact is it having?”, ” Is it beneficial to my teaching?” They can improve the quality of their teaching and this in turn will impact the children’s learning.  It also allows them to continuously develop new strategies and can enhance their self – esteem and professional identity as it enables them to make more professional judgements. Very importantly, it allows them to make crucial changes to the curriculum and provide the best learning environment for the children.

As said, there are still some disadvantages to this practice. A enquiry made at one school may not have the same beneficial effect in a different school. As a result this method is said to be “situationally unique”.  Also, enquiries that are made to just prove practices or find methods that “work best” that have not been explored sufficiently can be said to be superficial.