Critical reflection for pre-service teachers

 

The imperative for teaching professionals to critically reflect on the effectiveness of their everyday pedagogical work is a widely understood foundation for continuously improving educational practice. 

This is an important skill for your development as a teacher, particularly as you face difficult pedagogical challenges. Although early in our career we may be centred on what we do (that is, our ‘survival’ in the classroom!), over time we need to develop a broader framework for reflecting not only on our pedagogical actions, but also how these actually influence student learning, 

Most often our judgments about teaching and learning effectiveness become over time largely intuitive or unconscious, particularly as we gain more experience in the filed (which encourages to rely more on our developed intuition drawn from previous experiences).

Worse still, we can develop poor pedagogical habits if our approaches are left unchallenged, particularly where we begin to believe that certain approaches ‘work’.  Essential to counteracting this tendency is try to become more effectively critically reflective about what we are doing in the classroom.

It is therefore important that we periodically hunt those assumptions that underpin our practice. This is important because it can broaden our perspective, challenge these often habitual responses and allow us to investigate new possibilities.

One framework that can help us hunt these assumptions that underpin our approach is that of Brookfield’s (1999) critically reflective lenses. This framework was designed to encourage teachers to critically reflect on their teaching.

 

The essence of this framework is that:

 

●     understanding our work from different perspectives (including better understanding our own approach to the teaching) can prompt a broader understanding of the work we are doing; and

●     confronting the tensions (and sometimes contradictory pressures) of teaching can help us think through better ways of developing  improved pedagogical approaches.

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This framework advocates looking at supervisory work through four distinct lenses:

●     our self (or the effect of our own learning autobiography as a learner)

●     our students (whose voice can tell us much about the  pedagogical effectiveness of what we do)

●     our peers (who can disrupt our certainties and introduce new ways of seeing)

●     literature on teaching practice (that can broaden our understanding of what we do and how we can most effectively do it)