Week 17 Reflective practice

How do I reflect now?  I critique what I am doing, look for aspects I am pleased with and enjoy that feeling of success or completion or satisfaction that results. This has been worked for, through discussions with psychologists, counsellors, other teachers, reading about and practising mindfulness, learning about bullet journaling, as well as reading about reflection.  I make a conscious decision to celebrate successes, however small.

How else do I reflect now?  I critique my actions and look for areas that I can improve or take another step on.  These are not necessarily negative – I can improve on a success just as I can improve on a failure.  I can decide that the step I had planned to continue with is correct, wrong, needs further research, consideration or discussion.  If I am considering a failure or a problem, I can decide to review one or more steps, retry with minor changes, or even throw the baby out with the bathwater and go back to the beginning

I am learning to record my reflections by writing.   I sometimes write and destroy a first writing reflection because, since it is usually on a negative occurrence, I write to get all my feelings and thoughts crystallised in any order, and often criticise others and assign blame.  The physical action of tearing or screwing up paper can also help me take a metaphorical step back and begin to take note of the context of the event. From this new perspective I can usually find a few specific ideas to focus on, examine, evaluate, learn more about or change my actions. This seems to me to be what Finlay describes when she summarises Atkins and Murphy’s work.

When reflecting I find some structure helps.  If I am reflecting before action, I regularly use structures like de Bono’s thinking hats, Ryan’s Thinkers Keys, or Universal Design for Learning , our school values and student graduate profile, to both structure and check my thinking.  Because I work in a school that is predominantly Maori, I also use the “Whare Tapa wha” structure to guide my thinking; and to remind me there are several other cultures represented in our school minority. It is too much to use all of these structures all the time, but often awareness of a feature can help me to develop my thinking.  It is quite comforting for me to read Finlay’s comment “Models need to be applied, selectively, purposefully, flexibly and judiciously.”

What are my next steps with reflection?  One of the things I have become aware of writing this reflection is how long some of the structures and theories I use have been around.  This does not mean they are irrelevant, but rather that I need to search out more current ideas and see what I can learn from them. 

Writing and sharing my reflections is an area I have not done.  I lurk on a few blogs, but rarely comment.  I look back at blog posts that have resonated with me for some reason, and use these as a basis for thinking differently, or further.  I check on blogs written by people whose views I have come to respect, and think about their ideas and mine.  Sharing a blog post means opening myself to having other people do this with my ideas, and that feels uncomfortable. 

I’ll just have to cultivate a positive mindset, and decide that from discomfort will come growth!