(Week 12) Larrivee's Levels of Reflection

For my last post in my Learning Log for Lorayne's course "Critical and Reflective Practice in Education", I would like to use Larrivee's assessment tool to describe my own level of reflection, both past and present.

Early in my teaching career, before 2008, I was, as the above card accurately portrays, mainly in the Pre-Reflection (Level 1) and Surface Reflection (Level 2) stages.  Why do I think so?  Well, I taught my classes with the express purpose of relaying information with minimal support from any established theories, research or best practices.  As such, I was very teacher-centered considering most of my beliefs were based on my own classroom experience.  My focus was on short-term results and did not recognize the different learning needs of students.  As described in the article, my concern was, "mainly with means, rather then ends".

Since this time, I have been engaging in much higher levels of reflection.

Based on the following descriptors, in Larrivee's article, I would say that I'm currently navigating between Levels 3 and 4:

To break this down even further, before Lorayne's class, my practice indicated I was more in Level 3.  Having completed an M.Sc. in Linguistics at Aston University, in 2008, I developed a good habit of questioning my own assumptions and strategies based on theory and research in the field of TESL including how:

•  ELL's successfully acquire a second language, 
• to measure learning needs 
• to implement different methodologies such as Problem-Based Learning
• to assess students fairly, 
• to involve students' prior knowledge, 
• find alternative ways to represent information, and;
• constructively criticize my own learning

However, it wasn't until I moved back to Canada, in 2012, when I started to think beyond the classroom and different theories to look very seriously at what it means to have a quality educational experience and reflect upon the principles of justice and equality.  In Lorayne's course, my Critical Incident group used my current situation as the "International Student Support Officer" to address the "low retention rates of International students at Algoma University".  Based on the realities of my job, I've encountered a great deal of diversity, and because of this, I've had to seriously reexamine and question my own set of believes and learn how to suspend judgement - all of which, according to Larrivee, are descriptors of Critical Reflection!  

(Week 8) Building on the work of Schon and discovering gaps

For Week 8, I was partnered with Vicki as the lead discussants for the article by Ben Kotzee entitled "Private practice: exploring the missing social dimension in 'reflective practice'". I had worked well with Vicki in the past so I was very happy to work with her again .  We met on several occasions to discuss the article and I have to say I was surprised by the amount of discussion/collaboration we had in preparation for our lead discussion.  We discussed Schon's 'reflective practice' and whether or not it effectively explains how people learn professionally.  We talked about how Schon leaves out the social nature of practice (Ben Kotzee's main criticism), the role of tacit knowledge plays, the concept of expert vs. novice, and Schon's concepts of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.  Lastly, we discuss Schon's views of teaching reflection-in-action as artistry.

Out of all our conversations, I would have to say that Schon's expert versus novice was the most interesting especially when talking about his notion of the "architect's studio.  Schon explains "the different abilities of the architect and his student to design a building as a difference not in what the student and the architect can know or say but in what they can do almost without thinking and saying - the architect's mastery compared to the student's inexperience can be explained in terms of the architect's more extensive and fluent 'reflection-in-action'".  Vicki and I didn't buy into this theory because how can you then explain the likes of Joey Alexander, the gifted piano prodigy from Indonesia.

How at the age of 12 could he become such an expert?  How could he be better than other professional piano players who have played for 30 or 40 years?  How is Joey able to have such a feel for music?  I agree with Schon that being an expert comes down to "artistry" or a sense of "intuitive knowing" but I think the amount of time a person has to build up the store of tacit knowledge needed to become and expert is not a defining factor.

After our presentation, one of the main takeaways is that I had a much deeper reflection on the article and came away with a lot more knowledge because of the social dimension which existed during my group work with Vicki. In this sense, I feel that Kotzee was on to something about how Schon may have overlooked the social nature of refection.