2 Being A Reflective Practitioner

Every student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design (Doug Fisher)

At the minimum, our kids deserve a year’s worth of growth, for a year’s worth of time (John Hattie)

Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking about why you do it, and thinking about if it works. This is achieved through a process of self-observation and self-evaluation. Reflective teaching is therefore a mechanism for professional development which begins in the classroom.

So what does it mean to be a reflective practitioner?

Reflective: Characterized by deep careful thought. Practitioner: Somebody who practices a particular profession.

Therefore:

Reflective Practitioner: A teacher who uses deep, considered thought to improve (their) instruction.

When teachers engage in reflective teaching, they are dedicating time to evaluate their own teaching practice. This involves examining their curricular and content choices, seeking and considering student feedback on the delivery of learning, and making revisions to improve student engagement and learning. To activate a reflective process the teacher is required to gather information and interpret the collected data, in order to plan for (improved) future learning experiences. Reflective teaching involves examining one’s underlying beliefs about teaching and learning and one’s alignment with actual classroom practice before, during and after key concepts are taught. In short, when immersed in reflective practice, teachers think critically about their teaching and look for evidence of effective teaching.

However, there is ongoing instability within the education sector that distracts the teacher from being at their best for our students. The pressures on schools are well documented. These have been discussed and debated in staff rooms across the globe.

What are the issues that cause concerns for teachers and leaders in schools today? A summary of the literature categorises the challenges for educators into the following areas:

● advances in technology and communication

● changes in employment, family and gender roles ● increasing abdication from personal/parental responsibility ● the decline of social institutions ● globalisation ● complex ethical and ecological issues ● deep uncertainty and the rise of fundamentalism ● increasing divide between the haves and have-nots

Educational Clutter – Silver Bullets

Addressing the challenges has been the focus of school leaders as schooling around the world has seen the public arena call for more accountability and transparency on student learning. This has seen a growth in External Accountabilities (e.g. International Benchmarking -PISA, TIMSS; School Inspections; School Accreditations; Community Expectations).

To counter (or at least address) the rise of external accountabilities, there has been an increased focus on pedagogical innovations with schools trialling and implementing various programmes and initiatives. Some of these include:

● Professional Learning Communities ● 21st Century Skills Sets ● Flipped Classrooms ● Self Regulated Platforms (learning 24/7) ● Personalised Learning ● Flexible Learning Spaces ● Project Based Learning ● Innovative Schools

Unfortunately, a high-stakes approach to accountability have led to a narrowing of the curriculum and instructional dynamics. Furthermore, there is the marginalization of low-performing students, and a climate perceived by teachers to be less tolerant of students with lower academic levels and presenting with behavioural difficulties. While the aim of school accountability policies is to ensure every student receives high quality instruction and attains high levels of achievement, the consequence of such policies is a narrowing of the teaching and learning.

Why Things Often Fail in Schools?

School Improvement Plans require changes to teacher behaviour and without systems in place to reinforce those changes, teachers will revert to doing what they had been doing – which means not actually implementing the School Improvement Plan. Some reasons why this occurs include:

● A lack of ownership by staff and a deficiency of understanding why improvement is needed ● Not understanding how the learning is expected to be implemented, ● The pace of change is poorly managed, ● The change is mandated from the hierarchy, and ● The key leaders in the school lack commitment to the change.

The Teacher is the Key Agent of Change

“The hardest core to crack – is the learning core – changes in instructional practices and in the culture of teaching towards greater collaborative partnerships” - Michael Fullan

‘... the most important factor affecting student learning is the teacher. ... The immediate and clear implication of this finding is that seemingly more can be done to improve education by improving the effectiveness of teachers than by any other single factor’. (Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997).

According to many learned academics, what makes the greatest difference in a student's achievement is the teacher. John Hattie’s (2012) meta analyses highlights the teacher accounts for about 30 percent of the variance in student achievement.

This being the case, the question to ask is where to start to support teacher improvement? Classroom? Curriculum? Leadership?

Due to the multi-faceted nature of teacher’s work, teachers need a repertoire of strategies and content mastery is not sufficient for a teacher to be a competent professional in the 21st century.

The teacher will have to pursue professional development through multiple modes of learning, which include reflective practice, research-based practice, conferences and mentoring.

As noted above, reflective practice in teaching is arguably one of the most important sources of personal professional development and improvement. Effective teachers are first to admit that no matter how good a lesson is, their practice can always be improved.

Teacher reflection is important because it’s a process that helps teachers to collect, record, and analyse everything that happened in the lesson. It allows teachers to move from just experiencing, into understanding. If they don’t question themselves about what their experiences mean and think actively about them, research has shown that they won ’t make any changes and therefore derail improvement.

When teachers collect information regarding activities in their classrooms and take the time to analyse them from a distance, they can identify more than just what worked and what didn’t. They will be able to look at the underlying principles and beliefs that define the way they work. This kind

of self-awareness is a powerful ally for a teacher, especially when so much of what and how they teach can change in the moment.

How Can We Foster Reflective Practice? Noting that different practices foster reflective practice in different ways, addressing different dimensions of the reflective attitude is necessary. School leaders are pivotal to ensure:

● The vision is shared and owned and can be articulated ● We have established norms for how we operate (school expectations) ● Members receive feedback from multiple sources ● Collective inquiry helps members explore assumptions and practices to problem solve (what’s your strategy?) ● Data informed planning for teaching and learning ● Monitoring improvement and tracking progress ● Collective responsibility (everyone on the team owns the problem) ● Team members support each other

If these are some key ways to foster teacher reflective practices, then let’s explore some insights into the processes which inform what teachers at St Edward’s actually do when they act as a teacher researcher.

Timperley’s Spiral of Inquiry

Using Timperley’s Spiral of Inquiry (Figure 1) teachers undertake a continuous cycle of investigating student learning, identifying and focusing on a specific area of teaching improvement, thinking critically about the link between their teaching practices and student learning, coming up with a ‘hunch’ or a theory about what teacher action would best support that identified change in student outcomes. In doing so, learning more from their research and conversations with colleagues, and then trying out a new or modified practice. This is followed by checking its effect, leading to setting up a new inquiry. And so the process continues…

Figure 1: Spiral of Inquiry (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014)

At St Edward’s, action research is a ‘deliberate’ and intentional process occurring within the school setting (Figure 2). More precisely, it is a planned and self-conscious focused investigation of improving teacher practice and has a number of targeted components. A key characteristic of action research is that it is a solution-oriented investigation aimed explicitly at understanding and solving particular educational problems.

Figure 2: SET TAR Framework

At St Edward’s, action research is seen as a collaborative enterprise as it provides opportunities for colleagues to share, discuss and debate aspects of their practice with the aim of fostering school improvement and development. This involves responsible ‘sense-making’ or interpretation of data collected from within the field of a researcher’s own practice.

The purpose of the St Edward’s Teacher as Researcher (SET TAR) initiative is simply to enhance their own (or that of their colleagues) teaching ability. It’s a systematic reflection on their teaching practices with the sole aim of personal improvement.

The purpose of the school based research at St Edward’s, is fourfold:

● Address the gaps in the current knowledge by allowing teachers to investigate voids in their (own) teaching practice ● Expand the knowledge of teachers ● Test the knowledge already known about teaching and apply it to new circumstances or with different participants ● Add our voices not yet heard to the educational research knowledge.

Furthermore, a consequence of teachers undertaking action research (inside their classroom) is that it becomes more meaningful (and personal) to the classroom practitioner, promotes the voice of the teacher and highlights their professional role. Teacher researchers thereby become the creators of knowledge.

Such practice is a means to inform their decision-making across the many dimensions of school life. While school improvement remains the major basis for focusing on our school based action research, other areas are becoming more prominent. These include workplace health and safety, physical learning environments and even issues around professional development.

When discussing teachers as researchers, the focus is not on an experimental approach to teaching, but rather a practical means to improve teaching and learning. As no two classrooms are alike, the need for the teacher to be able to tailor the curriculum to the needs of each student becomes more apparent. The teacher must be able to rely on his/her knowledge through careful systematic observation guided by an understanding of various hypotheses to each context faced.

So What Does This All Mean?

For teachers, a changing world has generated a complex series of agendas at an exceedingly fast pace. The SET TAR has created a framework for teachers to ‘pause and take stock of what they are doing’: to analyse what they do and provides a platform for them to seek advice and to gain the required professional development support needed. At it’s heart, the process of teaching is being reformed/refocused.

The SET TAR demonstrates that its inherent processes can be used to enact change in a teacher’s teaching practices. This can only be good for the students in their care.

Bibliography

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.

Timperley, H., Kaser, L., and Halbert, J. (2014, April). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education, Seminar Series Paper No. 234.

Wright, S.; Horn, S. & Sanders, W. (1997). 'Teacher and Classroom Context Effects on Student Achievement: Implications for Teacher Evaluation', Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 11, pp. 57-67.)