Day 3 in the big brother…no wait, Day 3 of NTU Fellowship Week 2019. Here’s blog 3. Slightly different to the previous blog as this blog covers an alternative agenda. The blog below is also the blog that will stimulate the twitterchat hosted by #AdvanceHE_chat #LTHEchat on 27th March 8pm GMT. We thought it was pretty fitting to include some musings about reflection and the requirement to act as a reflective practitioner given that fellowship submissions depend on this way of thinking, acting and retelling.
Just reflecting on reflecting….sounds blissful doesn’t it? Well its not the zen-like status that might be conjured up. I am writing this blog in the middle of marking, teaching observations, supporting awards submission and working up plans to support our fellowship development at NTU. This is just the reality felt by many in teaching and learning- reflection whilst considered a necessary academic pursuit and much needed part of our professional lives often takes the back seat whilst we leap into the next task. The time to pause, take stock of activities and learn from experience to move our teaching practice forward is limited, largely on the hoof and predominantly a lonely activity. Whatever “model of reflection” called upon the loop is often left unclosed and learning from an experience/situation is not built into next steps.
There are many touchpoints for reflection in learning and teaching roles. These touchpoints can be categorised in terms of their presence in the teaching lifespan (pre-post teaching sessions, interactions with learners, period reviews, validations, curriculum designs, post-assessment stages) or indeed at junctions within our career development (appraisals, new portfolios of work, fellowship writing). Reflection can also straddle the continuum of formal or informal from writing up a case study for fellowship to the photocopy conversation which promoted a rethink about a session on your commute home- it is a very broad church.
Many of the how to books on being an academic point to the centrality of reflection. Ashwin’s (2015) edited book Reflective Teaching in Higher Education suggests that reflective activity links to curriculum development and the quality checkpoints in delivering a better student experience.
Reflection was deemed to be fundamental to development of a faculty- done in partnership with students the gain increased (Clayton and Ash, 2005). The work prompts two useful recommendations- firstly the notion of collaborative reflection (entering a reflective phase/activity with others and joining up the reflective outcomes in a more holistic way) and secondly involving students in the reflection soups up the outputs. With that flexibility noted and justification for engaging in the practice why is it such a struggle to be methodological in reflection?
In supporting colleagues as they prepare for HEA fellowship you do hear a fair amount about reflection. Here’s some of the soundbites that represent the struggle to reflect:
• I don’t have time– Reflection is often perceived as a luxury rather than a critical investment to prevent additional work later down the line.
• It’s just not what we do– The practice of reflection doesn’t always rest well within the cultural norm of the discipline, department, institution and career point?
• Who’s going to listen/ act on reflection? – How do you communicate the outcomes of a reflection? It is often hard to collate the by-products of your reflective activity which convey the value of the process. It is even harder to communicate the practice and value to others in order to mainstream reflection.
• It’s all a bit hug a tree – Reflection has a bad reputation for being flimsy whereas in reality the actual disciplined habit of reflection is fairly difficult to embed. Furthermore a structured approach can elicit significant learning. Race (2015) recognises that surface level questioning produces surface level outputs. Race proposes that for deeper criticality the reflective questioning needs to be a series of clustered inquiry points that drill down and unpick the situation.
• Who cares? – Reflection can feel very egocentric or indeed the dreaded imposter syndrome creeps in and your own reflective voice fails to carry weight (even with yourself). The cringe factor is turned up to 11. Furthermore it is rare for us to be granted “permission” to engage in a reflective process outside of discrete activities.
So there’s some work to do reimagining what reflection might look like in our context. The reimaging needs to challenge the stereotypes, needs to create a sense of urgency about engaging and needs locate reflective practice within the daily routines and cultural habits.
Let’s reflect on this together! Join in the #AdvanceHE_chat #LTHEchat on 27th March 20.00 GMT to compare notes on how you are using reflection.
- We often talk about transformative learning experience in the context of what we offer up to our students…what does transformative learning mean in the way we develop as teachers/academics/people involved in learning (whatever you call yourselves!) and how important is reflection in that?
- How would you reimagine reflection to work for you and your academic practice?
- What are the support mechanisms to nurture reflective practice to make it common practice?
References
Clayton, P & Ash, S. (2005) “Reflection as a key component in faculty development”, On the Horizon, Vol. 13 Issue: 3, pp.161-169, https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120510618187
Race, P. (2015) 4th ed. The Lecturer’s Toolkit: A practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching Oxon, Routledge
NTU Fellowship Community 