Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching #13 – Reflection in a hurry

Since mid-February, once a week (other than a fortnightly mid-session break) I have posted 300 or so words for Over a cuppa, a series of prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

The posts have been focussed on the practice of teaching, rather than students’ reflections for learning. My starting point was a belief that reflective practice is a learned skill, as outlined in the Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework, which includes the following capabilities from Foundational to Expert levels:

• Articulate the principles of, approaches to, and the values of, reflective practice.
• Reflect on own teaching, learning support and/or curriculum/assessment design practices.
• Explain actions taken in response to reflection on, and in, practice.
• Engage in sustained reflection on own educational practices and critique actions taken in response.
• Implement strategies to promote a culture that values reflective practice.
• Develop and support the strategic and systematic embedding of reflexivity into educational practice.

I have read (or reread) several books, including Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner; hook’s (1994) Teaching to Transgress; Brookfield’s (2017) Becoming a critically reflective teacher; Carter’s (2020) Academic Identity and the Place of Stories, as well as numerous journal articles.

I also linked to an interview with Stephen Brookfield, poetry, a meditation, creative non-fiction and my favourite tools for reflective practice – the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, ImaginePhD and the AdvanceHE comprehensive scholarly practice guide.

For each post, my colleague Fidel Fernando created an original digital artwork.

The reading, writing and drawing that has contributed to these posts belies the fact that this was reflection in a hurry. My initial plans for the series went off-piste as my ‘writing along the way’ took me in unexpected directions, and some of the posts include aphorisms – Put on your teaching cloak, Don’t be the wizard behind the curtain – inspired by conversations with colleagues.

There is still a lot of reflection to be done and the series will continue at the end of July. I am looking forward to finishing Ashwin et al’s (2020) Reflective Teaching in Higher Education and posting about Mary Ryan’s work on reflexivity and Marina Harvey’s ecology of reflection.

Behind the scenes… creating this week’s image:

Catch up on previous posts in this series:

Access previous ‘Reflection’ posts at this link.