1.4 Reflective practice in education – no reflection vs reflection transcript

No reflection:

The pre-service teacher doesn’t spend much time reflecting on the lesson. It was obvious that the game was a mistake, and that she shouldn’t try it again with the next group of students. She decides to create a slideshow teaching vocabulary and a worksheet to review it instead, which takes her another couple of hours of preparation.

When she teaches the next lesson, there is much less shouting and chaos. However, the students don’t seem very engaged in the worksheet, and she overhears one saying that the lesson was boring. Her mentor suggests that in the next lesson, she could try to cut down on the amount of ‘teacher talking time’ and try to include more active learning activities.

Reflection:

The pre-service teacher sets aside thirty minutes to reflect on the lesson and note down her thoughts. She realises that it wasn’t as bad as she’d first thought. Yes, the students were loud, but they were loud because they were shouting answers to the game – they were engaged and excited! She reminds herself that it was a game after all, so it wasn’t meant to be a formal, serious activity. However, the shouting made it hard to guide the game, and meant that some of the quieter students didn’t get an opportunity to answer questions.

She thinks about why this happened and wonders whether the students choosing their own groups set up a rowdy dynamic from the start. She also didn’t spend much time explaining the process for answering a question before the game started.

The pre-service teacher considers what she could have done differently. She could have spent some time before the class organising groups to establish a more productive dynamic, and she should have made the instructions clearer before the game started. She takes these insights and others into her planning for the next geography cohort and gives the game another shot with some changes to the original lesson plan.

There’s still a bit of shouting, but it goes much better than the first time, and all the students are engaged and laughing throughout the activity. Jana’s mentor congratulates her on the lesson, and she hears a student saying that geography was more fun than he thought it would be.