Two events in my professional life have recently converged to force me to think more about my own development, specifically thinking about reflective practice and how I can do this better. The first event that has forced this thought process, like all good students, is assessment. I am currently working with a group of OU students on a project around using digital diaries for reflection. When we had to select our project I decided to do a bit of research and found quite a lot of research about school teachers and nurses using reflective practice - there are far less available for those teaching in higher education. The second activity that made me reflect on my reflection was my probation assessment. This turned out to be a very stressful experience, largely due to incompetence of the university's HR department but that is par for the course. The interesting point that arose from this was that I had to produce a record of the various tasks I have been engaged with and map them to the performance framework for grade. This in itself was time consuming but not too difficult because I keep a very organised calendar and have a great memory but what fell out of my compiling this information was recognition that all too rarely do I stop to reflect on the experiences I have had sufficiently to truly gain from them. I had a wealth of experience on paper but had not sat and given thought to where I go next and why.
Several definitions of reflection have been put forward over the years including by John Dewey’s (1933) who defined it as ‘‘active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’’ (p. 9). Valli (1997) made this definition more lay-friendly, referring to reflection as where we ‘‘can look back on events, make judgements about them, and alter [our] teaching behaviors in light of craft, research, and ethical knowledge’’ (p. 70). Jay and Johnson (2002) furthered these ideas with the creation of a typology of reflection from descriptive reflection (e.g. What is happening and who is it working for or not working for?), comparative reflection (e.g. What are the alternative ways of viewing this?) and finally critical reflection (e.g. Given alternative views and my own views, what are the implications of this?). Whatever type of reflection we consider, the value seems obvious. Indeed I include reflective pieces in two of three modules I teach indicating I do really value the experience of reflection, so why then do I find it so hard to do. A clue for me comes from Davis' paper in 2003 where she discusses the challenges in post-92 universities. She notes that one of the biggest challenges for the post-92 universities is that they are starting to operate like pre-92 universities in terms of giving more weighting to research, amongst other things. She goes on to explain that the changes in the post-92 universities include "lack of resources, lack of recognition, overwork and lack of appreciation of the additional burdens put on academics, and invariably the institutions themselves, by widening participation and lifelong learning initiatives." (p.243). All of these things she says demotivates staff and drains the time they have to engage in true reflection. Davis wrote about the post-92 universities in 2003 and, from my perspective, 15 years later at a pre-92 university, I think the pressures are the same. I have sat in many meetings at King's where I am based hearing about the need to offer world-class education as well as be world-leaders in research. I have also been involved in numerous activities around widening participation and student support. I don't think it is simply the case that the post-92 universities are becoming pre-92 universities, I think the two cohorts of universities, who used to be more distinct and have distinct areas of priority, are now merging in their overall aims and academics from all universities face the pressures of change. With that pressure can come apathy and lack of time - two very dangerous things when found in conjunction for any career. So how do we solve this? I wish I had the answer to this; I definitely think there is something in the digital world that will support more efficient and permanent reflections for those who want that but how we make the mental head space for reflection in a timely manner is another matter. We ask our students to fill out surveys all the time about what they liked, did not like and would change but we don't explicitly ask staff so much. Should we do this perhaps? I suspect not - I think the formulaic approach would give formulaic answers - it would become (another) box-ticking exercise in academia. There are, of course, many other options, e.g. creating shared reflections with communities of practitioners. To an extent this is already available for those who want it through over-arching organisations like the HEA. For me, I need to be responsible for creating the space mentally to think about what I do and why - in enough time to change things if needed. This last point raises an interesting issue; substantial changes to module structures of assessment require approval many months in advance and sometimes before a final assessment is graded or student feedback is available, which means I can probably only base my changes on descriptive or limited comparative reflection. So my recommendations for supporting reflective practice would be:
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This week's blog is about reflecting on what I have learnt about Open Education over the last few weeks. Unlike my previous blogs here you will find a video where I discuss what I've learnt and what interests me the most. In the video I make reference to an interesting project in the UK on Open Textbooks which you can read about here. I also talk about the Open Pedagogy and refer to the principles of this which I think are really nicely outlined by Hegarty (2015) which you can find here.
I clearly need to get out more. This weekend on a sunny Sunday evening I decided to do a test to examine my digital skills level. The output was this rather appealing image which tells me I am pretty rubbish at digital creation but good at digital communication (I think because I am a chatterbox in any medium!). Now I would not say that there was anything in this image that surprised me, I think I generally knew my strengths and weakness but one thing that it did make we reflect on is the idea of digital natives. I am (as much as it pains me to say) too old to be a digital native but I do use technology all day and part of my day job is as the e-learning tutor a degree programme with ~450 students which means I spend a lot time trouble-shooting for students or colleagues and have definitely up-skilled in the process which is partly recognised by my reasonable problem-solving score. In direct contrast to some of my students who cannot find information on databases efficiently, use bibliographic softeward or format a word document I feel very much more digitally native. But - I have no idea what snapchat really is and I only recently discovered gifs as my twitter account can show. So how can I reconcile these two things? I have just been introduced to the idea of a visitor and resident continuum where a visitor dips and and out, using the tools for a specific purpose, whilst a resident is more socially invested in a tool - it is more about a place they share their ideas and their life. Here is my map: A couple of things to note here. Firstly, I am not on Facebook - I came off years ago and have never looked back. Secondly, I am on Twitter both personally and I edit the department account. For my own personal account I made a conscious decision to treat it like a personal time line. I am careful what I post, keeping in mind they can be seen by current and future employers and my students (so no comments about comedy things I read when marking). But I post regular pictures and comments about my hobbies (well my running and my dog but that is basically my hobbies!). I have invested myself in my twitter account and have become more and more familiar with the technology and hanging out in the twitter-sphere. Thirdly, I use VLEs both in my professional life as an educator and in my personal life as a student. I think the fact that I use them heavily to communicate with colleagues and students means I am effectively living part of me in the VLE. Finally, there are other quite discrete tools I use - SPSS and Spike are two software programmes I use for my research - they are licensed to me rather than the institution per se but bought with institutional funds and certainly serve little purpose to me outside of work.
When I see my skills mapped out in these two different ways I realise why in some contexts I behave quite differently to others. I also note that the resident technologies tend to be those which are built to be more social, perhaps with the exception of LinkedIn but my use of this is very limited. Apart from creating nice images this exercise reminds me how I interact with technology is important and is not always the same. It reminds me that some skills will transfer and that the relationship will change over time - I am quite new to blogging but already feel quite resident in my approach to it. It also reminds me to be more conscious, much as I did with Twitter, in deciding at what level I am going to invest in the technology. |