Bahrain Teachers College
University of Bahrain
Bachelor of Education – YEAR 2 – TEACHING PRACTICE 2 (TP2)
Professional Practice Reflection Journal
Semester 2
Designing Quality Learning Experiences
Teacher Candidate Details:
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Teaching Practice School:
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Cooperating Teacher:
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YOU MUST COMPLETE AND RETAIN THIS JOURNAL
TEACHING PRACTICE 2: Designing Quality Learning Experiences
The Practicum Seminar is a vital link between your classroom Teaching Practice and the teacher education programme courses at BTC. Discussions with your classmates in the Seminar are based on your experiences and information collected in the practice school setting. The structured writing tasks in this journal will frame the Seminar conversations between you and your peers. In the first part of the semester, you will be asked to document and describe, adding personal reflection. Analysis and deeper understanding become the focus as you become more adept at reflective practice.
ØMaintaining a reflective journal involves a series of essential tasks that form part of your teaching practice evaluation. These tasks would include such things as thinking about what you did and writing your thoughts down. For specific examples, see both the course syllabus and the observation check sheet completed at least twice in the semester by your BTC Faculty Supervisor (FS) and Cooperating Teacher (CT).
ØBy maintaining a reflective journal, you not only provide data that show that you are developing as a teacher but also demonstrate competency as a life-long learner.
ØAs a Student Teacher of the Bahrain Teachers College, you are required to maintain a reflective journal throughout the entire professional practice component of your Programme).
ØItems from this journal should be included in your Teaching e-Portfolio; evidence that supports professional and personal competencies.
Introducing Reflective Practice
إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
Why is Reflective Practice Important?
This journal, and other journals you will complete later on in your studies, is built upon the principle of reflective practice. It is important that you know what Reflective Practice (RP) is, in order to complete this journal properly. More than that, RP is a highly effective tool that will help you throughout your studies at BTC, throughout your professional work (“practice”) as a teacher, and in any Professional Development work or higher qualifications you will do in order to get a promotion. So, it is important that you become familiar with RP and understand how it works.
What is Reflective Practice (RP)?
RP can be thought of as “thinking and doing”, “thinking while doing”, or “reflection-in-action”. The Arabic words which are closest to the English word “reflection” are تفكير or تفكر or perhaps تأمل. We can think of “practice” as تطبيق meaning “to do something practically. So in one sense RP is about the relationship between thinking and doing, and might be translated into Arabic as التطبيق.
The basic idea behind RP is familiar to us from the Holy Qur’an, where we encounter many passages asking us to think or reflect about the world we see around us and our relationship to it. The passage quoted above comes from Surat Al Rum (Ayat 20) and suggests that reflection on the love and tenderness we find in our family and private lives will reveal deeper meanings to them.
We can also find similar passages asking us to think or reflect on things like our different languages and skin colours, on night and day, life and death, the wonders of natural creation. In each case, the Qur’an suggests that if we reflect carefully on everyday things which we sometimes take for granted, this reflection will reveal deeper and hidden meanings that will help us in our lives.
Reflective Practice in the Classroom
When it comes to teaching and learning, RP enables us to do something similar. During a busy day, it is easy to take what happens in the classroom for granted, to avoid thinking about it. If, however, we take time to reflect carefully about our teaching and learning, we will begin to understand what we are doing in a deeper and more meaningful way.
Where and why did Reflective Practice develop?
Reflective Practice as we understand it today developed in the United States of America during the 1980’s. The most important person behind the development of RP was the late Donald Schön (1926-1997), who was Professor of Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His basic ideas were presented in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. Since the 1980s, many other people have developed Schön’s ideas further, and today RP is one of the most fundamental ideas in teacher education.
Schön was concerned that a purely technical, theory-led education was failing to prepare students for professional work (“practice). In the 1960s and 1970s there was a big emphasis on teaching students lots of scientific and semi-scientific theories, and it was supposed that just by knowing these theories students would learn enough to become good professional workers. But this theory-led approach wasn’t much practical help when it came to helping new professionals to understand how they were actually supposed to do their jobs, and how they were to develop and improve their practice throughout their professional lives.
This led to a crisis of confidence in traditional approaches in professional education. People began to lose confidence in professional education, because it wasn’t helping people to become good professional practitioners. Schön called this theory-led approach technical rationality. He wasn’t against theory, or technology, or rationality. But he thought that these aspects of the job on their own were not enough to make sure that trainee professionals received an effective education in how to do their jobs.
In order to work out what to do about this, Schön carefully observed what real professionals did in their working lives: how they improved and developed their practice; how they thought critically about their work; how they learned from their mistakes; and how they solved problems.
To do this, Schön carefully observed people working in a wide variety of professions, including Education; but he also looked at how Architects, Managers, Medical Doctors, Psychotherapists and Scientists worked in real-life situations.
He noticed that in all these professions, good practitioners didn’t just learn lots of theories. Rather, they carefully observed what they were doing, thought carefully about what they were doing, and how they felt when doing it, and then changed or developed their practice in the light of these reflections. It occurred to Schön that however technical the work of these professionals was, good practitioners were not just technicians. Rather, the way they related to their work also had something in common with the way artists work, by having a “reflective conversation” between themselves and their situation.
Schön called this process reflection-in-action, to stress the close relationship between reflecting and doing: in Reflective Practice reflection always should be aimed at action, to improving things in the real world of professional work; this action then leads to more reflection, which in turn leads to better action. Understood properly, RP is a powerful tool to help us improve what we do and how we do it, because it creates a “virtuous circle”, where good reflection leads to better action. You are expected to begin this process during your Teaching Practice assignments at BTC.
Reflective Practice at BTC
RP is at the very heart of teacher training at BTC. It’s important that you understand what it is, and how it can help you develop professionally as teachers. In particular, RP is the key concept underpinning your Teaching Practice journals. In order to complete these journals properly, you need to understand some simple things about RP:
· Reflecting means thinking deeply about things that happen when you work as a teacher, what you thought, what you felt, how your thoughts and feelings affected your work and your relationships with students and colleagues
· But reflection isn’t just thinking, it should lead to ideas for action, or better still, an action plan that will help you to improve and develop your practice in a systematic way. In the course of your TP placements, you will practice various different ways of doing this
· Reflection should become a habit, it should become something you do all the time, an integral part of “who you are” as a professional. It should also lead to a “virtuous circle”, where good reflection leads to better practice, which in turn leads to new reflections, that then lead to new and better ways of doing things, and so on and so forth
· Reflection should help you develop your skills in problem solving and critical thinking. Real reflection isn’t just description (although description might be part of it), it should help you to think in new and more effective ways about how you should develop as a teacher.
· Reflection isn’t just a “fair weather friend”. It isn’t enough just to reflect on the things that go right for us. In fact, RP is often at its most valuable when we are dealing with problems, negative thoughts and feelings, and things that didn’t seem to go well
To be authentic, RP has to happen in real time. So, in your TP journals you will find weekly RP tasks. These must be done weekly, co-operating where asked with peers, CTs, supervisors, or BTC faulty.
New approaches to Reflective Practice
Since Donald Schön’s day, RP has become embedded as an essential element in the preparation of effective professionals. This is particularly true of the medical profession, and of education. Schön’s basic concepts have been developed, adapted and improved by hundreds of practitioners in the field, and in countries like Australia, Britain and the United States virtually every teacher trained since the late 1980s would have done RP in one form or another.
One of the most prominent thinkers on education to have developed Schön’s ideas is Kathleen M. Bailey, Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Monterey Institute in California. In her 2005 paper Promoting our own Professional Development through Reflective Teaching Journals, Bailey identifies several different types of RP, some of which might be relevant to the journals you will complete at BTC:
· Rapid Reflection: immediate and automatic reflection-in-action; “thinking on your feet”
· Repair: thoughtful reflection-in-action aimed at fixing things that have gone wrong
· Review: less formal reflection-in-action, “playing events over in your mind”, without necessarily making diagrams or writing up action plans
· Research: systematic reflection-in-action over a longer period of time, leading to the production of written reports or studies; “action research”
· Re-theorizing: using reflection-in-action to improve on theories or theoretical knowledge
· Re-formulating: using reflection-in-action to arrive at new and better ways of doing things
All of these kinds of reflection-in-action might be useful for your TP journals. But it is important to ensure you begin the process of RP as soon as possible during your time at BTC.
If you have any difficulties either with understanding what RP is, applying it to your Teaching Practice, or writing up your journal entries, it is very important that you seek help and clarification from your tutor. This can be done during the TP seminar sessions, or privately in discussion with your tutor during office hours.
RP is a well established practice around the world, not just in “Western” countries, but also in places like Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore. However, outside of a few elite institutions like the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut, RP is relatively new in the Gulf and the MENA region in general. Therefore you can see yourself as pioneers, introducing into Bahrain, the Gulf region, and the Arab world new approaches.
Structure of the Teaching Practice 2 Journal
Over the 22 days of Teaching Practice 2, you will complete this journal and a series of teaching tasks. The Journal will engage you through a series of reflective tasks that engage you deeply in a broad spectrum of professional practice. In turn, these richer understandings will also help you mature in your teaching role.
As a teacher candidate of the Bahrain Teachers College, you are required to maintain a reflective journal throughout the entire teaching practice. Each Journal Entry includes a peer discussion point and a reflection prompt
There are different styles to journaling can be approached in many ways: diagrams, dot points with expansion of a key idea, reporting style text, illustrations/photos with analysis. Some of the tasks will be better completed in one style rather than another. You may want to try different approaches with some of the questions.
REFERENCES:
Bullock, A. A., & Hawke, P. P. (2001). Developing a teaching portfolio: A guide for preservice and practicing teachings. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.
Hardin, C. J. (2008). Effective classroom management: Models and strategies for today’s classrooms (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Khine, M. S., Lourdusamy, A., Quek, C. L., & Wong, F. L. A. (2005). Teaching classroom management: Facilitating teaching and learning. Singapore: Prentice-Hall.
Rand, M. K., & Shelton-Colangelo, S. (2003). Voices of student teachers: Cases from the field (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Tileston, D. W. (2007). Teaching strategies for active learning: Five essentials for your teaching plan. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Corwin Press.
Teaching Journal Checklist Programme: B.Ed. Year 2 Stage: TP2 – Semester 2
In a suggested sequence, tasks should be done by the end of Teaching Practice 2. When you have completed the Journal task, tick off the box in the list. Your Faculty Supervisor will then assess your work and add suggestions in the comments section.
Rate: Not Yet Evident = NYE; Competent = C; Exceeding Competence = EC
Task / Includedý/þ / Quality
(NYE, C, EC) / Guiding Comments
Preparation –Starting Off / /
1. Getting Started / /
2. Student Learning Needs / /
3. Using Differentiated instruction
4. Self Study – My Learning Needs / /
5. Building Rapport / /
6. Extending Students’ Thinking / / / Mid-point review: Am I meeting my goals? What do I need to work on?
7. Getting away from the Textbook / /
8. Scaffolding Learning / /
9. Assessing Learning Progress / /
10. Final Review and Ongoing Learning Goals / /
Journal Entry Pre 1: Starting Off - Prior to TP Placement