Transcript Reflective practice

Reflective practice
Session 3 –
Developing approaches
to reflective practice
research
Introduction
• Welcome to the third session on reflective practice.
• This session will build on the reflective practice research
skills that you began to use in Session 2 with the learning
journal.
• We will be looking at four additional research activities for
reflective and reflexive teaching – using audio and video,
interviews and questionnaires, graphic representation,
and peer research assistants.
Using audio and video
• Being observed in the classroom is an everyday event for
most teachers but it is far less usual to hear or watch our
own classroom performances. Yet the opportunity to see
and evaluate our own teaching is invaluable.
• As with all other reflective practice, when choosing to use
audio or video, you should identify an area you want to
know more about in your own teaching. It might be to look
at the balance of teacher/student talk or you might want to
know whether certain students work better in a group or
individually. You do not have to record the whole lesson
(unless you want to understand something over that
period of time) – a ten-minute section of the lesson will
yield substantial data for analysis.
Video
• Video recordings can be useful in showing you aspects of
your classroom. For example, you might want to see how
all groups work when you are involved in working with one
group. The video quality simply has to show the elements
you are interested in, and be able to pick up sound from
the appropriate source. Remember too that you are the
only audience (unless you choose otherwise) so don’t be
too worried about appearing on film.
• A case study about the use of video in reflective teaching
is available at
www.gaera.org/ger/v9n1_2012/No1_FALL_12_Pelligrino_
Gerber.pdf.
Audio
• Audio recordings can be useful for considering aspects of
classroom talk – the students’ or your own. You might
want to check, for example, whether your instructions and
explanations are clear, whether students use talk to build
ideas (or just dominate the conversation), and ways you
respond to student talk.
• If you would like to read more about talk in the classroom,
a paper by Neil Mercer and Lyn Dawes is available online
at www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=l8hYVMeSIrH8gfz24DoCQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=mercer+talkin+classroom.
Using interviews and
questionnaires
• Part of the collection of evidence for reflective practice
might include the views of students.
• Bearing in mind a power dynamic that sometimes means
students answer in ways they think you might want them
to (or the opposite, of course) nevertheless, if you explain
your purpose in wanting to make learning and teaching
even better in your classroom, most students respond
well.
• Remember too that all evidence collection has an ethical
dimension, as discussed in Session 2.
Interviews
• Appropriate questions are the key component of any
interview so, once again, what exactly do you want to
know about this students’ reaction to a particular
classroom event and how will this information help you to
action change?
• ‘Good’ questions ask for extended responses (not ‘yes’ or
‘no’) and ask about one event at a time. Multiple questions
(Did you find xx easy or difficult? Why? What else could
there have been instead?) are impossible to answer with
any thought. The standard approach is to try the questions
out first with a group you will not be interviewing, so you
can test for clarity and accessibility.
Interviews (continued)
• You do not have to have individual interviews. You can
have focus groups of six to eight students. These work
well so long as you are aware of any over-dominant
voices which might skew data.
• Interviews will need organising – who, what, where,
when – and interviews with students are usually time
limited to about 10–15 minutes. You will need to record
the interviews and transcribe the most important
responses afterwards (whole transcriptions are very time
expensive).
• For further discussions on interviewing, the following
paper might be of interest.
www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/resined/interviews/inthome.htm
Questionnaires
• Questionnaires offer an immediate advantage in that they
produce written responses which usually are relatively
easy to analyse.
• The same advice about questions applies to
questionnaires. They have to be clear and unambiguous.
However, the difference is that a ‘yes’/’no’ answer is
actually quite helpful – too many ‘open’ questions and you
will spend a very long time analysing responses.
• You might also like to use the Likert Scale – a response
from 1–4 indicating ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’
(not five boxes or your respondents will tick the middle
box).
Questionnaires (continued)
• Do not have too many questions – you run the danger that
your respondents will either give up or tick randomly
towards the end. Ten questions are more than enough.
• Make the questionnaire easy to answer with underline or
circle responses.
• Do not offer more than one or two ‘open’ questions (which
may be stem sentences, e.g. ‘I learn best when …’, or at
the end of the questionnaire, e.g. ‘Anything you would like
to add?’).
• Give your respondents adequate time to respond.
• Decide whether you really need a name (anonymous
responses can be more honest).
Questionnaires (continued)
• Consider an online survey (e.g. surveymonkey), which will
also analyse the data into graphs (you still have to
analyse the results though).
• Unless you have a captive audience, most questionnaires
only have a 30 per cent response rate. If you are seeking
opinion outside of the classroom, allow enough time to
send reminder e-mails.
• The following link gives more information on
questionnaires.
www.edu.plymouth.ac.uk/RESINED/QUESTS/index.htm
Graphic representation
• Put simply, this is a picture representation of a classroom,
or a place where learning is taking place, at any given
point. It does not call for artistic skills and a simple piece
of A4 and a pencil are sufficient to produce valuable and
often intriguing information.
• The picture should show an event (such as reading at
home) with the student, and any other information that is
relevant, included in the picture. In this scenario, for
example, you might ask the student to include the name of
the reading materials.
Graphic representation (continued)
• The picture can then either be used as a prompt for the
student to talk to you about their drawing, which you could
record, or you can use the drawing as a starting point for
reflection.
– How has the student represented himself/herself?
– What else have they chosen to include that might be
important to consider?
– If it is a classroom, where are they sitting and who
else is near?
– Are you in the picture? What are you doing?
• This is not art therapy which is a separate skill in itself, but
rather an opportunity to literally see the world as your
student sees it. Reflecting on the experience of students in
this way can be both powerful and revealing.
Working with a peer: having
a research assistant
• This is a non-judgmental activity. You invite a colleague into
your classroom as a research assistant – that is, you set the
agenda and ask him/her to collect evidence for you. You later
meet with your colleague to discuss the data and make some
decisions on action. It may be that they will ask you to
reciprocate.
• You might, for example, ask your colleague to sit with a
particular group of students and note responses to a set task.
You might want your colleague to work with gifted and talented
students and to report back on extension work you have set or
collect evidence on students who are underperforming.
• The research assistant role enables you to collect in-depth
evidence in ways you might like to, but cannot in the
day-to-day demands of the classroom.
Peer research assistant
• In order for this to work effectively, you will, as always,
need to be clear about what area you want your colleague
to focus on, why, and what evidence will be most useful to
you.
• You will also need to ‘book time’ for a meeting after the
lesson so that you have time to explore the research
evidence together, analyse findings and decide on
actions. This activity will provide reflective opportunities for
you, but also for your colleague.
• Advice on observation can be found on the Learning
Wales website, but it is important to remember that this is
not observation by a manager, but a collegiate and invited
activity.
Applying reflective
practice skills
Activity 1
Using the learning journal template in the facilitator’s pack,
please consider the scenarios on the next slide.
Select one approach from those you have read about so far
which would allow you to gather evidence to support
reflective practice.
Say why you have chosen the approach you have and what
you would expect to learn from it that other strategies might
not let you achieve.
Scenarios
1. You have been using a new resource to teach your
students. You are pleased with the outcomes generally
but the students do not seem enthusiastic.
2. You have asked students to do some work involving
internet research on a given topic at home. Only four
students have completed the task.
3. You have been using a smartboard to teach and you are
interested to know whether your impressions about the
impact on students’ learning and interest levels are
accurate.
Approaches to reflective
practice in action
• In this session, you have considered using four
approaches to reflective practice – all designed to gather
evidence in ways useful to reflective and reflexive
practice.