Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education - Reflective Practice

My understanding of reflective practice is reflecting on my strengths and weaknesses and looking at areas for improvement and development. " Continuous quality improvement in the short term and using evidence e.g. student evaluations to improve content and delivery in the long term". (Bauer, 2010).

For my learner centred learning paper I did a critical review of my teaching practice and created a lesson plan for the session on Human Rights.  See the link below which gives an over-view of the session, my observations and reflections regarding how it went, what happened, how it could be improved and plans for the future.

Link to critical review of teaching practice

During the planning for this session I focused on resources that would have some relevance to the students and considered interesting stories that would help them to link the learning with their own experiences, recognising that "(S)tories and dialogue can be effective technologies for the reflective process because they provide cognitively complex and culturally potent systems for conveying the way we think about, feel about, and make connections in experience"(Amulya, 2013, p.3).
I find using this technique helps when I ask them to remember back to a previous session and use the story to prompt their memories, this helps them link the learning together and make sense of previous sessions.

Using the lesson plan created for this session, I have added some 'in action' reflection and some reflection 'on my action'.  See below;

Amulya (2013) points out that "a person could reflect very frequently, bringing a high level of awareness to her thoughts and actions, but rarely stopping to look across what she has noticed to consider what could be learned by exploring her patterns of thinking across different situations".  In other words, diversely reflecting on the good, the bad and the ugly, at any stage before, during or after. Then "analysing the learning that has emerged", rather than recognising it has happened but not doing anything to change or enhance the experience at a later stage.

"Kolb's Learning cycle proposes that learners plan for and have concrete experiences that they reflect on and derive meaning from.  They do this by making connections and contextualising the experience within their existing knowledge framework.  Learning from and through experience is therefore at the heart of reflective practice." (International staff, 2012)
Learning through experience
Link to Kolbs Cycle of Experience

In earlier posts I have discussed the way I have introduced blogs with my diploma students and have linked the research surrounding the inportant reflective opportunities these processes provide.  I have found my own blog an amazing reflective tool and use the previous learning that I have done to illustrate new and emerging learning that is currently happening.  In the future I hope to start introducing blogs to my certificate students, to help encourage them to use the blogs to reflect on their and others work.



References:

Bauer, Gabriele . "Become A Reflective Practitioner -- Bauer - YouTube." YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Sept. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWnpsiwmups.


Amula, Joy. "What is reflective practice?." itslifejimbutnotasweknowit. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 June 2013. <http://itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files

International staff, 2012, Learning and teaching.  Retrieved from;http://www.internationalstaff.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching/developing-reflective-practise/