Evaluation for Excellence Toolkit: Structured Self Reflection

Background

Reflecting on your own teaching, can offer you insights into your own practice allowing you to be understand what you do well and where there is room for improvement. The recipe card gives a framework to undertake regular self-reflections to better develop a working process for enhancing your own practice. The links and resources suggested below offer ways to enhance this even further and develop your own reflective practice.

Recipe Card Detail

Reflective teaching practice helps to develop confident lecturers. Using structured self-reflection will help you in developing your ability to understand how your students learn and the best ways to teach themIdentifying any barriers to learning that your students may have PREPARATION: Download a reflection note sheet.  TIMING: Usually 30-60 minutes, best to do outside of assessment periods.  EQUIPMENT: Computer or tablet.

1. INTRODUCTION You’ve just done some teaching: how do you feel it went? How do you know what the students think? Even the best teachers never stop learning how to improve and continuously work through an ever-evolving cycle of activities that can be broadly summarised into ‘plan, do, reflect and conceptualise’.	2. REFLECT  Reflecting is the most critical part of this process, but something many of us struggle with. As a starter why not use the reflection note sheet on the accompanying web site after a class to make some notes on your reflections? This provides a structured set of questions to enable you to think through your practice in a reflective and systematic way.	3. REPEAT  To get the most outofself-reflection it is important to make it a regular part of your practice.Two ways to achieve this are:  to annotate lecture notes on an ongoing basis and change appropriately to keep end-of-term reflective summaries from which to revise existing classes	4. ANALYSE  To analyse these effectively, use the framework below:  Look for patterns in your reflections; Talk to colleagues or mentors about what you’ve noticed; Read about potential solutions via the DCAD resource base; Join a learning and teaching community.
5. ACT  Develop an action plan to tackle any issues raised. An example plan should address:  What are you going to do? What will I do to make this happen? What obstacles exist? How will I know I’ve done it? When will I review my progress?	6. REPEAT AGAIN  Enhancing your practice is an ongoing process so repeat steps 2-5 every academic year as part of your continuous professional development. Keep in mind the ongoingcycle of ‘plan, do, reflect and conceptualise’.	7. EVIDENCE  Youcan evidence structured self-reflection by providing an overview of your process, examples of reflections, actions taken as the result of reflections, and the impacts of these actions on your teaching practice.	Download a full colour version of the recipe cards.Recipe Card (PDF)

Links to Online Resources

1. Levels of Thinking about Learning and Teaching (Houghton, 2011). This downloadable document from AdvanceHE suggests a number of questions to use in self-reflection, which you could use after every session.
2. Useful Questions for Self Reflection. This downloadable form, based on Biggs’ expanded model of teaching in HE, could be used after each teaching session.

Links to Papers/Books

1. John Biggs’ book is the capstone text of modern University teaching practice, and covers many important topics including the important of reflective practice. 
   Biggs, J. B.(2011), Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does 4thed., Berkshire: McGraw-Hill Education (UK), Available via University Library Online
2. Stephen Brookfield’s book brings together for lenses for enhancing your teaching practice: Lens of their own autobiography as teachers and learners Lens of students’ eyes Lens of colleagues experiences Lens of educational literature And is highly recommended: 
   Brookfield, S. D., (2017), Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Available via University Library Online
3. The experiential learning cycle proposed by David Kolb is equally useful for staff and students. It sees learning as a four stage process involving a concrete experience, which is reflected on, conceptualised and experimented. Powerfully it is equally valid to apply to both student learning and staff development.
   Kolb, D. A. (2014), Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development, Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT press, Available via University Library