Great Students Have Teachers Who Learn Every Day
Critical reflective practice can transform the education system and our classrooms. Here’s the guide to get it done.
I don’t know a single educator who doesn’t want education reform. The context in which learning and teaching happens matters. From funding to curricular standards to school structure to professional development models, it all shapes the purpose and potential of our work.
But, here’s the hard truth: No one is coming to save us. No presidential candidate, governor, or district superintendent is going to swoop in with a cape and make it all better. Schools are always going to lack resources, be hampered by political decisions that are divorced from the learning needs of students, and struggle for clearly aligned values and policies.
While all of these factors matter, the number one factor that shapes student learning is their relationship with teachers. There are failing schools with great teachers and successful schools with failing teachers. The context matters, but great learning can happen with great teaching.
In an ideal world, schools would be communities defined by critical inquiry and meaningful learning for all stakeholders. Students, parents, faculty, staff, and administrators would all have intentional spaces and processes for examining their roles in the community and learning how to improve their contributions. Unfortunately, politics, culture, and a lack of resources prevent this from being common.
Educators, be the education reform you wish to see. Structured reflective practice is how we get better at supporting learning. It’s how we engage critically and creatively with our practice, how we come to understand learning needs, and how we hone our craft. It’s also how we set an example for students of what meaningful learning looks like.
A Framework for Reflective Practice
If you’re in a department, school, or district that offers structured reflective practice, consider yourself lucky. Professional development in education so often focuses on introducing tools or “best practices” for content delivery and classroom management. Collecting and understanding how tools work is important in any profession. But, knowing how to wield them creatively and effectively is the challenge. Having the finest hammer in the world doesn’t make you a great carpenter. You can be a fantastic carpenter with the most rudimentary of tools. It’s our vision for what we’re trying to create, dynamic understanding of the components involved, and the skill with which we wield our tools that defines the quality of our work.
Reflective practice is rooted in a simple cycle of learning:
- Ask a question related to student learning.
- Gather data.
- Analyze that data for insights to evolve your practice supporting learning.
- Implement changes and gather data for the next round of analysis.
This can be done by an individual educator. But, learning is most productive when it’s done with others who can provide alternative perspectives and positive emotional support. There is enormous value in engaging this process with various groups. Grade level teams, whole departments across grade levels, or student support teams can reflect in ways that span more of each student’s full learning experience in the school community. Reflective practice that crosses affinity groups can be incredibly powerful, bringing together teams of students, teachers, administrators, and parents in various combinations to gain broader perspective. While any expansion beyond an individual educator will undoubtedly require additional work and even political maneuvering within the school community, the payoff can be exceptional.
Tips and Tools for Reflective Practice
Like any learning space and process, the success of reflective practice hinges on the culture and process in which it happens. Here are some suggestions:
- Be Positive — While it’s natural to focus on areas for improvement, it’s also draining and emotionally difficult. Focus on identifying and leveraging strengths. Doing more of what is working and finding new ways to wield strengths effectively can have far greater impact than trying to develop new skills or shake bad habits. And, when we lean into our strengths, we are likely to do more of what we enjoy doing.
- Be Patient — Reflective practice is an iterative process. To see positive outcomes, we often have to go through the cycle multiple times to try new things, learn what works, and then try something else. Ideally, the cycle never ends as we continue to shape our practice around the needs of each class of students and our evolving skills and passions.
- Be Conservative — A little can go a long way in reflective practice. While asking big questions is important, making small changes to your pedagogy and practice will help to ensure you don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Big changes are best built up to by testing lots of little approaches to see how they might shape a more systemic change to your approach.
- Be Intentional — Make a plan for your process and stick to it whenever possible. Schedule a regular reflection time to review data and evaluate new approaches. Consider how you will test and gather new data for the next cycle in ways that are realistic to your other commitments. And, try to integrate your process into your existing work schedule rather than pushing it to the margins of your day or week. Low energy and lack of focus don’t make for productive learning.
- Be Transparent — Share your process with others. Doing so opens the door for others to be inspired by your learning process and support you. Be specific in requests for feedback by telling people when is a good time to share it with you and what format is most helpful (e.g. what did they like rather than what they didn’t, etc). Humble but intentional learning tends to be contagious. If you start your process alone but share it openly, don’t be surprised to find others asking if they can join.
Having the right tools for the job is always helpful. Here are a few essentials:
- A Schedule — Plan specific and realistic times for each task in the cycle. If you’re engaging this process with others, work in advance to put specific times on the calendar. The less specific your plan, the less likely you are to follow through. Planning to meet every Monday after school, for example, will result in lots of missed weeks due to holiday weekends throughout the year. Rhythm is often the key to keeping the process going.
- Pedagogical Principles — Learning and teaching are dynamic and complex pursuits. A core tool for productive reflection is having a list of pedagogical principles. Principles highlight essential tensions we wrestle with in pedagogy so reflection and data can be given context quickly. When time and energy are limited, principles serve as shortcuts to our biggest challenges. Additionally, when the principles are concise, they serve as a rich common language to facilitate reflecting on complex concepts with groups of people. Over time, a simply stated principle comes to carry complex meaning through collaborative exploration. That meaning can be leveraged simply by referencing the principle rather than unpacking the entire concept.
In my previous work leading our learning community at Thinking Beyond Borders, our team developed the following Principles for Learning and Teaching. Consider using them as a starting place for your reflective practice. While I encourage you to entertain ways to revise, update, or rewrite these principles to align with your values, I also suggest you work with them for a while first to explore their dynamic meaning before changing them.
Principles of Learning & Teaching
- Learning and teaching require intentionality, humility, and critical reflection on the world and ourselves.
- The teaching/learning relationship is triangular, where teachers serve as guides, helping to illuminate the subjects we explore together as learners.
- There is no right way to learn.
- No one holds a monopoly on truth.
- We should strive not to have an answer for every question, but a question for every answer.
- Learning and teaching are intellectual, social, cultural, spiritual, and emotional processes.
- Learning and teaching are neither linear nor immediate — it can only start where you’re at.
- Each person is responsible for their own learning.
- Aim for greatness and believe in everyone’s capacity to achieve it.
- Celebrate every win.
As educators, we have a right and responsibility to advocate for better conditions for learning and teaching. With full teaching loads and additional responsibilities within their schools, many teachers commit time and energy to advancing crucial reform movements. Don’t stop that work. It matters. But, be sure to create space to continue to learn about your craft and hone your art as a teacher. Your students will benefit. Your work will be more effective. And, it may just be your greatest opportunity to reform education.
This post is part of a series supporting educators in reflecting on their pedagogy and practice. Read the intro to this series If We Don’t Work on Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters or explore the most recent posts below.
Celebrate Learning Over Achievement ← P R E V I O U S
