1(a) What do the terms mean to you with regards to your personal professional development?
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Continuing: Professional development is supposed to take place throughout all phases of a teacher’s academic life (Day, 1999).
Proffesional: Complex of systematically organised and transferable-theoretical knowledge (Lunenberg, Dengerink and Korthagen, 2014).
Development: General growth is not focussed on a specific job. It serves a longer-term goal and seeks to facilitate growth of teacher’s understanding of teaching and of themselves as teachers. It often involves examining different dimensions of a teacher’s practice as a basis for reflective review and can hence be seen as ‘bottom-up’.
According to Day (1999), the term ‘continuing’ refers to the teacher’s ‘professional development’. Given that, and as the term speaks for itself, this development is a never ending process. Therefore, for me it is important to be aware of developing my teaching continuously. For that reason I took the chance to go abroad and get to know two different educational systems by travelling to the USA (two months) and Spain (five months).
Apart from the three mandatory internships asked from the University of Kiel, this opportunity has been enriched and still is enriching my academic life so as to it benefits my future teaching with the help of several tools and strategies I learned during the time period. In particular, during the internship at the West Elementary School in Tooele, Utah I have been able to reflect my teaching every day. Since every class consisted of two groups of the same amount of students who either had lessons in the morning or in the afternoon. This swap made possible to analyse content and actions of my teaching on the basis of this daily repetition of the lessons. Hence, then I was able to improve things that did not go well earlier the day later in the second round.
Carrying out small-scale classroom-based research, e.g. in form of texts, is a way to achieve a ‘development’. As soon as the research is based on theory which can be transferred to the approached knowledge this then turns into a ‘professional’ manner.
Continuing Professional Development enables learning to become conscious and proactive. This can be achieved by learning activities that make development and enhancement of teachers’ abilities possible.
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1(b) What activities can a teacher’s development include?
Teachers can undertake a range of learning activities. One way could be self-study by reading professional journals or adding new practices to their classroom. Another possibility is to collaborate with colleagues, or take part in workshops.
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Professional development activities can include action research. The best way to apply action research is first to set a time limit for improvement in order to have a goal. Then, the next step is to find the appropriate approach by going through literature and research that is of relevant interest and help to improve teacher’s practice.
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1(c)How can you adapt the described reflective practice of Luise for a teacher?
The quality of teaching in a classroom will be improved by creating a surrounding where a continuous improvement exists. As the job of a teacher always holds challenges for yourself as a teacher, you won’t ever be done improving yourself and consequently your lessons. That is, the change is happening within the teacher’s learning process when they, for example, develop their belief and ideas as well as their teaching practice in the classroom.
1(d) What can a reflective practice look like? What would be required from the school (headmaster, colleagues, etc.)?
Write what your ideal setting for reflective practice would look like.
First of all, there has to be a way where reflective practice can be visualised. This means the teacher reflects his or her own teaching and writes down what has worked well and what aspects need improvement.
After this is done, teachers should share their experiences of their own teaching practice and learn from each other in their teams. Therefore, the teachers have results with which they can work. In order to solve the occurring problems, teaching methods and strategies could be changed. For that the assistance from within the teacher’s environment is needed so that the teacher can enhance his or her professional development which includes the cooperation with students, colleagues, and the principal, etc. Furthermore, the staff can develop their abilities by learning or adapting new skills which they then may implement in their classes.
1(e) Choose one of the quotes from this youtube video and write some lines why you chose this quote and what it means to you.
The quote “Reflective Practice is as much a set of mind as it is a set of activities” by Joseph Vaughan (1990) was the first one that appealed to me right away. Its message is that reflection is more than a mental process because it also includes actual activities. This means, by the ability to reflect on your actions in your daily teaching practice you pay critical attention to the values and theories you are always confronted with. However, at the same time you include professional development activities to this everyday practice. This will help you to measure the improvement you are achieving during the process of reflective practice.
Furthermore, the following quote sums up the idea
of the reflective practice extremely well: “Education is about learning – not only student learning, but also staff learning. Learning is a function of reflection.” Accordingly, students and teacher can be compared to a coin which has two sides and thus, cannot be separated. That is, students as well as teachers benefit from self-reflection since thereby they advance in their learning process. I personally agree with the fact that in life you never stop learning and reflection of any kind should be implemented so as to make learning worthwhile. One might think you learn from your mistakes anyway, so why do you need to reflect on them? This is exactly not the case owing to my belief that reflection always takes place and generally this happens subconsciously without us knowing. The better option, however, is to be aware of the reflective steps in order to have a permanent change where mistakes may be avoided actively and your teaching practice can be evolved in the long run.
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1(f) What are the requirements of your University for reflection? What kind of tools do you have to use (guidelines of the University)?
For the most part it depends on the university teacher to select or prepare the reflection sheets by either providing the students with the requirement for a reflection, or tell them personally what they aspect beforehand.
1(g) How have you reflected in your studies or teaching practices so far? What kind of tools have you used?
Mainly reflection took place orally after a lesson was prepared and presented by me in the university classes or in the actual classroom at a school. Apart from self-reflection, fellow students and the academic pointed out positive feedback and gave suggestions for improvements for the given lessons. Moreover, rarely written reflection by a university teacher reached me where I got a very honest and well-thought-out email about my engagement in a lesson.
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During my internships the mentors first took notes about content and procedure of my lessons in written form on a requirement paper sheet and talked with me about it in detail afterwards. In addition, the students I have been teaching made also clear whether they liked my lessons or not. It has been a pleasure to see students having fun and learning something important that I taught them. This is the evidence enough that I did something right.
1(h) How does the spoken reflection take place? Is it recorded somehow?
The spoken reflection is normally not recorded anywhere as it is a face-to-face reflection that in general takes place after the given lessons in person or in front of the class.
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