8. Reflecive teaching

What we understand by reflective teaching?

If we want to be good teachers, we should look at what we do in the classroom. There are some questions that we can ask ourselves with the purpose to improve our teaching at the end of the lessons. I would ask me:

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     What was the objective of my activities?

-         Did the activity work?

-         What have my students learnt?

-         What problems did the students have?

-         Were all students on the task?

-         Did the students enjoy the classroom?

-         What can I do to improve? What I would do different?

These questions would help me to analyse my teaching. Teachers have to observe, analyse and evaluate their own teaching. By collecting information about what happens on the classroom we can identify and explore our own practices. Also, it can help us to lead changes and improvements in our teaching process.

Reflective teaching doesn’t mean just that. If we actually want to reflect about our own practise we should collect all information that we can. Not just things that we have to improve, as well as things that effectively work.

We can gather information doing different things:

1.     Teacher diary

2.     Peer observation

3.     Recording lessons

These activities can provide very useful information for reflection.

What can we do after? Once we have some information, we have to THINK about our own practise. TALK with our peers and discuss some teaching beliefs, compare what they think. READ, we should find more information about what we are observing. There are lots of websites for teachers where we can find useful ideas or academic or research articles. And the last step is ASK. We can ask in teacher’s communities to know what other experts think about it. Also, you can ask for teacher’s associations that makes teacher training or conference where you can gather more information.

As my experience, I’m doing English in a small group of old people and I always ask the seven questions at the top of this post, when I finish the lesson. I collect information and I bear in mind the different aspects when I have to plan the next lessons.  Sometimes I discuss different problems that my students have with my peers on the university and it is really useful, because most of them are teaching as well as me and they give me proper advices.

In conclusion, reflect in my own practise help me to improve. Sometimes I decide to keep activities and sometimes I decide to do something difference that I think can help my students to learn effectively. 

Picture of  my English group 1. Centre Cívic El Figaró