The Effectiveness of Reflective Teaching - by me

Teaching? Well it sounds easy for me. I give lecture, students nod their heads. I give more lectures, students jot down the notes. That is only for those who are interested. I give lecture, students yawning or playing fool at the back without knowing their objectives for coming to class. When the time is up, I get out from the class and return to my cubicle smiling happily assuming that the students understood what I have taught. Then the process remains the same as it should be every time I teach. Isn’t it easy to be a teacher? It was easy to me but that was long before I joined the Kursus Asas Pengajaran (KAP) held at UiTM. The course had reflected me so much that now I don’t want to be the ‘old me’ anymore.

Now I realize that teaching is not only focuses to the traditional way of teaching but it also requires a lot of researches, creativity, perseverance, teaching philosophies, reflection and so forth. When we choose a particular role, do we think about the responsibilities or the challenges we have to face? Yes we do think of them but how far we implement them effectively. Reflecting the role that I choose, there are still a lot of improvements needed to become an extraordinary teacher. Hence reflective teaching should be practiced by teachers to evaluate and analyze the teaching skill to achieve higher effectiveness.

The definition of reflective in the Oxford Dictionary carries a meaning of tending to think deeply about things or thoughtful. Whereas in the same source the word teaching by mean is the work of a teacher. On the other hand, reflection is a metacognitive strategy that helps teachers think critically upon their experiences, actions and decisions during their teaching practices. Metacognition is an awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes.

According to John Dewey (1933), an American philosopher and educator, the process of reflection for teachers begins when they experience a difficulty, troublesome event, or experience that cannot be immediately resolved. Prompted by a sense of uncertainty or unease, teachers step back to analyze their experiences. This stepping back can occur either in the midst of action or after action is completed.

There are three primary reflection spaces that you need to know in practicing reflective teaching. The spaces are general reflections on education, classroom reflections and self-assessment reflections.
In general reflections on education, the questions are more likely to help you articulate your philosophy of education. The following sets of questions below are some of the examples:

• What is education and who is it for?
• Who am I teaching?
• What should we be teaching?
• Why teach?
• Who teaches?

The second space, classroom reflections is also crucial to help you think about the atmosphere and design of your classroom. The following question might help you to have a better environment.

• How do I want students to interact in my classroom?
• In what ways is it important for students to interact with the community in which
they live?
• What resources should be available to my students?
• How can I use the wall space in my classroom to further active learning?

The last space, self-assessment reflections can help you think about your work this week and this year for instance, what have you learned this week? What have you taught this week? How are you doing in your work? Below questions are designed to provide you with some space in which you can consider your own professional development.

• What was the most important thing I tried to teach my students this week?
• What is/are the most important thing(s) my students will learn from me this year?
• What did I learn from my students this week?
• What was I thinking?

In view of the above reflection spaces, why do you think we need to reflect? Reflective practice helps teachers to have a deeper understanding of their own teaching style, teaching philosophies and teaching identities. While we are teaching, we are also learning. As you reflect, you will better understand your role as teachers.

In addition, reflective teaching gives you more control and you become empowered. This control is in terms of the class development. By having a well prepared lesson plan, you will not be teaching a topic that is outside your teaching content. Plus the class activities which you have planned encourage involvements of each student and make them feel that they do not fall behind as everyone is constantly learning.

Reflective teaching also makes you see yourselves as “growing”. From the pass teaching experiences evaluation, not only you will improvise your way of teaching but you will also be looking forward to make it more interesting in the future.

Moreover, teaching becomes connective when you practice reflective teaching. As you become sensitive with yourself and your class environment, you are not only making a connection between the outcomes for the students but also the outcome for yourselves. Besides that, you see the “ideology” behind teaching and classrooms become more democratic.

To have an effective reflective teaching there are three suggested technology-integrated ways for reflection that you can practice. They are self observation, teaching journal and action research.

Before you can implement the self observation, you need to have sets of questions like in the self-assessment reflections. Then you need to video tape your lesson. This is one of the techniques where you observe and evaluate yourself under the guidance of the sets of questions you decide before the observation.

Rather than writing your teaching journal in traditional way, why not use blogs to write about your experiences or record some specific teaching events, and your feelings about them on periodical basis. As you go through the reflective cycle, you can write down your experiences on your journal.

Action research includes data collection and data analysis. It is a reflective study of a teacher’s actions and the effects of these actions in a classroom context. After you decided on your problem area that you want to study on, you can use SurveyMonkey.com, SurveyShare.com or some other free online survey tools (survey software) to prepare survey to collect and analyze the data.

In conclusion, there is a lot of benefits in reflective teaching and one of the primary benefits is it creates awareness of own knowledge, assumptions and past experiences. In my opinion, it is very significant for you to question yourselves on general reflections on education, classroom reflections and self-assessment reflections in order to achieve higher effectiveness of reflective teaching. The practice of video taping your lesson, creating blogs and doing action research for reflection are good ways to evaluate your conclusions, actions and work process itself to further your personal and professional development. Thus, nurturing reflective teaching is crucial to successful teacher education.

Good luck to all TEACHERS out there!