Week 1 - Summary Reflection Exercise

EDU710 Weeks 2-4.

In these weeks, we were preparing for our first assessment of the course. This was a steep learning curve, learning a more formal way to assess my own and peers performance as an educator, and backing up these thoughts with pedagogical references. In week 2 we began by reflecting in an informal way, looking at our previous experience. I focussed on my work in the design industry, in the studio and as a guest lecturer at various universities. These exercises made me realise how little I used past experiences to improve future teaching sessions. Poetically written but true: “I write to capture the essence of my experience in order to create a canvas for reflection in my quest to realise my vision of practice as a lived reality, and in doing so develop my professional artistry.” (Johns, 2017)

In week 3 we began planning for our micro-teach session. Having never filled out a form with a structure for a session before I was a bit intimidated at first, but found the process relatively clear and beneficial by the end of the week. It made me really think about how I was going to interact with the students, what I wanted them to have learnt at the end of the session, how to keep them engaged, how to structure the session… really obvious things but ones I hadn’t directly considered before! These questions were inspired by the reading material for the week, summarised by the statement “The teacher should be an agent for transforming knowledge, helping students to interpret and to construct their own knowledge, not a passive substation that relays preformed messages to them.” (Biggs and Tang, 2011) I also found the Bloom’s Taxonomy diagram (as suggested by a peer on a forum page) very useful when writing my plan, I made sure to use clear descriptors like ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’ rather than anything too vague.

The preparation in weeks 2 & 3 made the running of my micro-teach session a lot better than it could have gone, but there were still areas to improve. I did my session with a group of fellow new mums, teaching them a simple baby massage routine. My assessment 1 submission shows a clear description of the positives, negatives and learnings from this experience so I won’t go into it here. But I did feel more confident in this session than I would have if I hadn’t prepared, which is the point of planning isn’t it?

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Johns, C., 2017. Becoming A Reflective Practitioner. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, p.23.

Biggs, J. and Tang, C., 2011. Teaching For Quality Learning At University. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, p.81.