This reference tool for mastering reflective practice and initiating it in your school offers ideas for reflective practice alone, with partners, in small groups, and schoolwide.
Written for teachers, administrators, and professional development specialists in schools and universities, this book is an educators’ guide to reflective practice. In clear, accessible language, the authors explain the potential to create meaningful change in schools and show you how to integrate reflective practice effectively into the daily work of schools. The book: - Explains reflective practice as a professional development strategy and its importance for school reform - Offers ideas and practical strategies to facilitate collaborative, data-based inquiry, dialogue, and problem-solving in schools - Describes reflective practice in action and illustrates its power to create meaningful change in classrooms - Shows how reflective practice is an important step in creating professional learning organizations Reflective practice has the potential to renew your sense of optimism, commitment, and efficacy as you learn how to support meaningful professional growth, shape a culture of learning, and make important changes in students’ learning.
This book provides specific strategies for facilitating reflective practice and is the first to provide a practical guide to professional development and school reform from this standpoint. The authors show how reflective practice provides powerful strategies to help professionals learn from their experiences, improve themselves, and thus improve schools and education. Applications in every area of professional development and school reform are presented.
The connections between reflective practice and professional development are the focus for this book, which offers guidance to support lasting change and provides strategies to enable self-initiated professional development. The book includes: - traditional approaches to reflective practice - how to enhance the effectiveness of reflective practice - putting reflective practice in context - how reflective practice can improve attainment for students and staff - an Appendix of useful resources. With case studies and examples of relective practice from trainee teachers and from students studying across a range of Education courses, this book equips the reader to develop their own reflective practice framework. Relevant also to practitioners working across the children′s workforce, it encourages personal and professional development for the whole range of professionals working in education and care. Peter Tarrant is a Teaching Fellow at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh.
Just as successful athletes must identify strengths and weaknesses, set goals, and engage in focused practice to meet their goals, so must teachers. Learn how to combine a model of effective instruction with goal setting, focused practice, focused feedback, and observations to improve your instructional practices. Included are 280 strategies related to the 41 elements of effective teaching shown to enhance student achievement.
As a school administrator, instructional coach, or teacher leader, you know that reflective teachers are effective teachers. But how can you help teachers become self-reflective practitioners whose thoughtful approach translates into real gains for student achievement? In Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice—a companion volume to their teacher-oriented book Teach, Reflect, Learn—authors Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral draw on lessons learned from educators across grade levels, content areas, and district demographics to present a definitive guide to developing a culture of reflective practice in your school. Hall and Simeral expand on ideas originally presented in Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success to help you gain a clear understanding of your role and responsibilities—and those of your teachers—within each stage of the Continuum of Self-Reflection. Armed with the book’s real-life examples and research-based tools, you’ll learn how to determine the current location of all stakeholders on the continuum and how teacher-leadership activities, transformational feedback, and strategic coaching can move them forward. The end result? A schoolwide culture that both values reflection and uses it to ensure that teachers—and their students—reach their fullest potential.
This book investigates the ways in which pre-service teachers develop and articulate their professional knowledge by presenting their reflections on contemporary issues and topics they have explored during their own teaching practicums. It uses reflective practice to connect pre-service teachers’ personal backgrounds with their placement experience concerning a self-selected topic, including teacher educators’ reflections on the pre-service teachers’ reports on these placement topics. By illustrating the broad range of issues encountered by pre-service teachers, sharing multiple perspectives on the complexity of classroom practice, and demonstrating the importance of reflective practice, it also provides a valuable mentoring framework. Moreover, the book studies how examining pre-service teachers’ life experience can facilitate in-depth understanding, specifically in the context of pre-service teachers’ reflections on their own practices in different educational settings. In short, the book helps current and prospective pre-service teachers and teacher educators get to know their students and themselves better using reflective practice.
This book offers a detailed examination of reflective practice in teacher education. In the current educational context, where reflective practice has been mandated in professional standards for teachers in many countries, it analyses research-based evidence for the power of reflective practice to shape better educational outcomes. The book presents multiple theoretical and practical views of this often taken-for-granted practice, so that readers are challenged to consider how factors such as gender and race shape understandings of reflective practice. Documenting approaches that enhance learning, the contributions discuss reflective practice across the globe, with a focus on pre-service, in-service and university teachers. At a time when there is pressure to measure teachers’ work through standardised tests, the book highlights the professional thinking that is integral to teaching and demonstrates ways it can be encouraged in beginning teachers. Aimed at the international community of teacher educators in schools and universities, it also includes a critical examination of methodological issues in analysing and evaluating reflective practice and showcases the kind of reflective practice that empowers teachers and pre-service teachers to make a difference to students.
A practical guide to the essential practice that builds better teachers. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher is the landmark guide to critical reflection, providing expert insight and practical tools to facilitate a journey of constructive self-critique. Stephen Brookfield shows how you can uncover and assess your assumptions about practice by viewing them through the lens of your students' eyes, your colleagues' perceptions, relevant theory and research, and your own personal experience. Practicing critical reflection will help you… Align your teaching with desired student outcomes See your practice from new perspectives Engage learners via multiple teaching formats Understand and manage classroom power dynamics Model critical thinking for your students Manage the complex rhythms of diverse classrooms This fully revised second edition features a wealth of new material, including new chapters on critical reflection in the context of social media, teaching race and racism, leadership in a critically reflective key, and team teaching as critical reflection. In addition, all chapters have been thoroughly updated and expanded to align with today's classrooms, whether online or face-to-face, in large lecture formats or small groups. In his own personal voice Stephen Brookfield draws from over 45 years of experience to illustrate the clear benefits of critical reflection. Assumptions guide practice and only when we base our actions on accurate assumptions will we achieve the results we want. Educators with the courage to challenge their own assumptions in an effort to improve learning are the invaluable role models our students need. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher provides the foundational information and practical tools that help teachers reach their true potential.
What do we mean by reflective practice? What does it involve? How can it help you develop as a teacher? The Teacher’s Reflective Practice Handbook is an essential source of advice, guidance and ideas for both student and practising teachers. Helping you to translate pedagogical knowledge into practice, this Handbook guides you through studying your own teaching for personal development, evaluating your lessons through classroom research, and enhancing the quality of pupil learning. It offers an innovative framework which serves to prepare you for the challenges and complexities of the classroom environment, and supports the continuing improvement of your teaching. Underpinned by key theoretical concepts and contemporary research within the field of education, chapters help you to: systematically evaluate your teaching through classroom research procedures question personal theories and beliefs, and consider alternative perspectives and possibilities try out new strategies and ideas to maximise the learning potential of all students enhance the quality of, and continue to improve, your teaching. Including a range of reflective tasks, links to online resources, exemplification material and further reading to help you develop your own thinking, The Teacher’s Reflective Practice Handbook is an accessible guide which supports the facilitation of reflective practice through self and peer assessment, problem-based learning and personal development planning. The multi-dimensional framework enables you to build a meaningful, personally relevant portfolio of evidence-informed practice.