Reflective Journaling (1):
Assessing my Own Teaching
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Saturday,
September 20, 2014
Twitter:
@jonacuso
Post
146
When
asked to assess your goals for teaching, what are you supposed to reflect upon?
Though the question sounds rather ambiguous, it can be directed to address my
beliefs about the learning process. Understanding that students may be learning
differently in terms of purpose, we must admit that we have
deep-learning-oriented students and surface-learning-guided learners. Based on
this premise, my goals for my teaching is to raise awareness -among my
students- of the importance of developing one’s critical thinking skills. These
skills can be quite practical and useful during one’s professional practice and
career. To sum up, I want my pupils to become thinkers and not just brains that
can regurgitate theory that they cannot relate to anything tangible or
intangible in the real world.
How
about asking yourself about your beliefs about teaching? Though the question
again is ambiguous, once more it can make us reflect on our basic beliefs about
our performance in class. Though I now teach on a sort of blended learning
fashion, I must confess that I need to make good use of my F2F time with my
learners. While I am dealing with students, I see myself as a trainer with a
group of trainees who need to be guided to achieve the course’s goals, but
successfully. Success in this very case is not just to be able to replicate a
behavior, as stated in Bloom’s Taxonomy, but the ability to use the
recently-acquired knowledge in different scenarios related or unrelated to
their current or future working environment. In short, I want to have my pupils
well-trained for the moment they become professionals looking to find their
niche in the working world.
As
a teaching professional at the university level, all of us have to be certain
that learning is coming every single week. As for my experiences and new
knowledge is the understanding of the learning dichotomy that learners are
exposed to: “deep learning” or “surface learning?” For a test in or out of
class both types of students can succeed, but for what it may mean for one’s
future professional life, it may simple be just a lost memory lying somewhere
in the back of one’s mind that cannot be retrieved, some sort of a blocked
memory. For this learning dichotomy I cannot work with learners unless I design
and then develop a hands-on activity that “forces” them to comprehend processes
and behaviors that they need to replicate to accomplish a final product at the
end of my learning tasks. In brief, PBL (Project-Based Learning) combined with
F2F guidance and a blended phase on their own can be a way to set the path for
students to walk towards their development of deep learning.
Have
you ever been provided with a strategy that resonated with you? I bet all of us
in education “suffer” from frequent epiphanies. My latest sudden realizations
were connected to create an effective “bridge” between what happens in class
(F2F teaching), what learners have to do on their own (application of
newly-acquired knowledge or blended learning scenario), and what needs to
happen in class the next time you meet with your students (learning
consolidation activity and [formative & summative] feedback). The second
was the introduction of dense questioning, a technique used in reading skills,
literature, etc. The combination of these two elements have been quite
enlightening for my current teaching. It never occurred to me that these two
pieces were part of the same puzzle and learning in my teaching journey.
Oxford Brooks University. (2014). What is a
Reflective Journal? Retrieved on 2014, Sept. 20 from the Oxford Brooks
University website at https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/upgrade/pdf/reflectiveJournal.pdf
Northern Illinois University, Faculty Development
and Instructional Design Center. (2014). Reflective Journals and Learning Logs.
Retrieved on 2014, Sept. 20 from the Northern Illinois University website at http://www.niu.edu/facdev/resources/guide/assessment/reflective_journals
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Saturday, September 20, 2014
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