I am reblogging this from my university’s learning and teaching blog. The poem will be familiar to regular readers of this blog (but well worth reading again). Future posts will be new content, but it seemed fitting to start from the first sip. And I want to share the artwork created by my talented colleague Fidel Fernando.
Welcome to a new regular feature Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching. Once a week during Session 1 and Session 2 we will publish a short post (250 to 300 words) which prompts you to reflect on your learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.
One of the most well-known models for reflective practice comes from the work on Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner (1983), which was based on his university teaching in urban planning and his students’ experience of fieldwork. Schön describes reflection as a process whereby individuals try to understand “some puzzling or troubling or interesting phenomenon” while questioning “the understandings which have been implicit in [their] actions, understandings which [they] surface, criticize, restructure, and embody in further action”(Schön, 1983, p.50). Schön developed a neat binary which offers a useful starting point: reflection-in-action (occurs in the moment) and reflection-on-action (after the event). Subsequent reflective practitioners have added reflection-for-action (future-oriented) (Killion & Todnem, 1991).
Reflection is a learned skill and an ongoing process. The focus of these posts will be your practice as a teacher, rather than your students’ experiences of reflection for learning (although, as you will see, the two are interconnected). These guided activities will be linked to scholarly literature and practical resources, and aligned with Macquarie’s Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework.
| PLaCE level of competence (Reflective practice) | PLaCE Capability |
| Foundational | R1.1 Articulate the principles of, approaches to, and the values of, reflective practice. |
| Proficient | R1.2 Reflect on own teaching, learning support and/or curriculum/assessment design practices. R1.3 Explain actions taken in response to reflection on, and in, practice. |
| Accomplished | R1.4 Engage in sustained reflection on own educational practices and critique actions taken in response. |
| Highly Accomplished | R1.5 Implement strategies to promote a culture that values reflective practice. |
| Expert | R1.6 Develop and support the strategic and systematic embedding of reflexivity into educational practice. |
Reflection and feedback on practice from the Professional Learning and Capability Enhancement (PLaCE) Framework
For now, I will leave you with a poem that struck a chord for the awkwardness of being new to teaching, the power of poetry in the classroom and the importance of reflection.
School of Embodied Poetics by Nina Pick When I first started teaching, I thought my students could see my heart on my sleeve. I thought they could read the footnotes of a body splayed open as a book. I felt embarrassed to have such a visible heart; there was something shameful about the whole goopy mess, its ungovernable pulsations, its lightening blush. It seemed none of my students had a heart like mine; their hearts were bundled in their baggy sweatshirts like a packed lunch. I stood up there on the first day and dug my hands into my pockets, thinking I could hide my heart and its waywardness. I slumped my shoulders, faced the blackboard, shouted from behind the projection screen. But wherever I stood, my heart sparked like a disco ball, doing its unmistakable kaleidoscope dance. I went to my supervisor: I’m so embarrassed, I said. I think my students are judging me harshly. They’ve probably never seen such a heart before. She shuffled papers, looked at the results of my classroom observation. She said, Well, the best you can do is be a role model. Maybe they’ve never had the chance to learn about the heart. Try teaching it the same way you teach grammar. So I went back to class, and returned to the living pulse of the text: I glimpsed the luminous globe behind the poem’s dark ribs, felt its warmth streaming through form, through syntax, through meter’s tangled orchard. I saw the poem as a latticework interwoven with sun. Each sentence was parsed by the light. On the desks we drummed the heartbeat of the iambs. My heart led an orchestra of small flowers.
Killion, J., & Todnem, G. (1991). A process of personal theory building. Educational Leadership, 48(6), 14–17.
Pick, Nina. (2013) ‘School of Embodied Poetics’ in This Assignment is so Gay: LGBTIQ poets on the art of teaching, ed. Megan Volpert. Little Rock: Sibling Rivalry Press.
Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
