Assessing my
Own Teaching
Reflective Journaling Combined with Some Mindfulness
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano
School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Post 226
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.
Wednesday, March 02, 2016
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