Sunday, November 1, 2009

Reflective Teaching


Reflective TeachingTeaching requires a lot of researches, creativity, perseverance, teaching philosophies, reflection and so forth. 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. Pennington (1992) describes reflective teaching as “a movement in teacher education in which … teachers analyze their own practice and their underlying basis and then consider alternative means of achieving their ends. Applied to the context of teaching, reflection can be interpreted in terms of mirroring, symbolizing or representing, as well as in terms of thoughtful consideration.

How can I begin reflection?

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. There is no one way in which a teacher should explore her own classroom practices in order to self-observe and self-evaluate. But it is important to begin by collecting information about what happens in the classroom.

What can I do next?

Having obtained information about what goes on in your lessons, the next step would be to think and analyze the information:
• What were your goals [for a particular lesson]?
• How did you intend to achieve those goals?
• What actually happened?
• How do you feel about this?
• What could you do/have done differently?

Reflective practice helps teachers to have a deeper understanding of their own teaching style, teaching philosophies and teaching identities. In addition, you will improvise your way of teaching and 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.

2 comments:

  1. Education system in Maldives is pathetic, specially now. Musthafa doesn`t know anything. he himself is pathetic.

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