Self-reflection is a part of teaching that I have largely overlooked. Most of us reflect on our actions as a daily practice but deeper reflection as a means to ensuring best practice enables me as a teacher to realise the mistakes I’m making, ‘purposeful thinking for better understanding’, ‘a disciplined enquiry of self-practice’. This in turn removes uncertainty, building my confidence in the classroom.
A simple framework to follow for reflective teaching looks at one’s teaching descriptively, comparatively and critically. One can examine individual teaching contexts describing, what’s happening, who it’s working for and who it isn’t working for. Watching videos of teaching and dissecting the language used in a classroom; are instructions framed in the correct meta-language? Can everyone understand them? Pre-planning instructions helps me to take a step back from the basic procedures to be followed in a lesson and attend to how teaching can be improved to achieve the lessons’ aim. How many questions have been asked to students during a lesson? Are my questions posed open or closed-ended? Counting positive and negative feedback to more closely examine how my teaching is aiding language acquisition. Careful deliberation and critical reflection allows one to consider all the various alternatives and decide which is the most suitable for any one classroom setting.
The role of a teacher is to transmit information by presenting it intelligibly, in a way ‘that is clear and easy to understand’. Active, persistent and careful deliberation of daily teaching allows for immediate improvement in my classroom. The areas that I feel I should focus on in future revolve around lesson aims and achievement of them, further choosing one skill or area to work on in any one given lesson and devoting the majority of lesson time to this. I would like to be firmer when setting goals and stricter following rules that I set to maintain a high standard of teaching in my classroom.
J.C.Richards, Towards Reflective Teaching , Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong.
T.Tripp and P.Rich, Using Video to analyse one’s own teaching , British Journal of Educational Technology Volk ◆ 43 No.4 ◆ 2012.
J.K.Jay & K.L.Johnson Capturing Complexity: A typology of Reflective Practice Teaching and Teacher Education ◆ 18 (2002) ◆ 73 – 85.