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?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more

Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life. There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader.  I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have
Read more