Post #10: Reflection on Teaching, The other side of Reflection

 I think a lot about the process of reflection. It's kind of my thing. I really don't think we professors do enough of it. Because even done right, it's painful (don't worry, I know I am using fragments. I can smell one a mile away, which annoys my students.)

By "done right," I mean balanced. One conclusion from my dissertation research was that there is too much "rush to judgment" and "negativity" in reflection. "What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it?" This violates good manners to oneself and the reflective thinking process we were all taught back in the 1970s (and still works, thank you very much).

Why don't we start with reviewing the good? Actually, reflection should start with a deep dive of the whole experience. If I come out of a class that was a disaster (my immediate feeling), my first response is "oh, heavens, what am I going to do?" when it should be, "How did I prepare, how did the students respond, what was going on in the room, and how do I feel (emotions) about it." Observe fully, then diagnose, then plan. 

I say this because I had a couple of pretty bad classes last semester. I won't go into it, but they wore me out because the students were so unengaged, or seemed to be.  In retrospect, they were a combination of confused, underprepared, traumatized, and overwhelmed--in many ways due to their high school experience in COVID. Some were massively unsuccessful (0 GPA their first semester, not a good start.) I tried to help, and nothing seemed to work. 

After a lot of emotional turmoil, I decided it wasn't the material I had chosen, or activities I put together, or my personality. But it was an expectations problem on my part. I did most things well, but 20% not. 

The objective and subjective need to be reflected upon. Reflection is a mirror, by the way. We don't fix what looks okay in the mirror (unless we are narcissistic). 

I told my students this week, "if you get a 75 on a psych test and need to be making 85s or 90s, you need to reflect on your performance. But you got 75% of the questions right--why? How did you learn that 75%? Think about that before you reflect on what you got wrong."  

This principle can extend to all of life. "I need that thing! I must buy it." Really?  Can we reframe that? Are we coming from a deficit model or a strengths model? Or, is what we think we don't have driving us more than what we do have?

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