Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching. The first sip!

Welcome to a new regular feature Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching. Once a week during Session 1 and Session 2 we will publish a short post (250 to 300 words) which prompts you to reflect on your learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

One of the most well-known models for reflective practice comes from the work on Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner (1983), which was based on his university teaching in urban planning and his students’ experience of fieldwork. Schön describes reflection as a process whereby individuals try to understand “some puzzling or troubling or interesting phenomenon” while questioning “the understandings which have been implicit in [their] actions, understandings which [they] surface, criticize, restructure, and embody in further action”(Schön, 1983, p.50). Schön developed a neat binary which offers a useful starting point: reflection-in-action (occurs in the moment) and reflection-on-action (after the event). Subsequent reflective practitioners have added reflection-for-action (future-oriented) (Killion & Todnem, 1991).

Reflection is a learned skill and an ongoing process. The focus of these posts will be your practice as a teacher, rather than your students’ experiences of reflection for learning (although, as you will see, the two are interconnected). These guided activities will be linked to scholarly literature and practical resources, and aligned with Macquarie’s Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework.

PLaCE level of competence (Reflective practice)	PLaCE Capability
Foundational	R1.1 Articulate the principles of, approaches to, and the values of, reflective practice.
Proficient	R1.2 Reflect on own teaching, learning support and/or curriculum/assessment design practices. R1.3 Explain actions taken in response to reflection on, and in, practice.
Accomplished	R1.4 Engage in sustained reflection on own educational practices and critique actions taken in response.
Highly Accomplished	R1.5 Implement strategies to promote a culture that values reflective practice.
Expert	R1.6 Develop and support the strategic and systematic embedding of reflexivity into educational practice.

For now, I will leave you with a poem that struck a chord for the awkwardness of being new to teaching, the power of poetry in the classroom and the importance of reflection.

School of Embodied Poetics by Nina Pick

When I first started teaching, I thought
my students could see my heart on my sleeve.
I thought they could read the footnotes of
a body splayed open as a book.
I felt embarrassed to have such a
visible heart; there was something shameful about
the whole goopy mess, its ungovernable pulsations,
its lightening blush. It seemed none of my students
had a heart like mine; their hearts were bundled
in their baggy sweatshirts like a packed lunch.
I stood up there on the first day and
dug my hands into my pockets, thinking I
could hide my heart and its waywardness.
I slumped my shoulders, faced
the blackboard, shouted from
behind the projection screen.
But wherever I stood, my heart sparked
like a disco ball, doing
its unmistakable kaleidoscope dance.
I went to my supervisor: I’m so
embarrassed, I said. I think my students
are judging me harshly. They’ve probably
never seen such a heart before.
She shuffled papers, looked at
the results of my classroom observation.
She said, Well, the best you can do
is be a role model. Maybe they’ve never had the chance
to learn about the heart. Try teaching it
the same way you teach grammar.
So I went back to class, and returned to
the living pulse of the text:
I glimpsed the luminous globe behind
the poem’s dark ribs, felt its warmth streaming
through form, through syntax, through meter’s
tangled orchard. I saw the poem as a latticework
interwoven with sun. Each sentence was
parsed by the light.
On the desks we drummed
the heartbeat of the iambs. My heart led an
orchestra of small flowers.

Killion, J., & Todnem, G. (1991). A process of personal theory building. Educational Leadership, 48(6), 14–17.

Pick, Nina. (2013) ‘School of Embodied Poetics’ in This Assignment is so Gay: LGBTIQ poets on the art of teaching, ed. Megan Volpert. Little Rock: Sibling Rivalry Press.

Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Next week: The second sip: ‘Put on your ‘teaching cloak’.