[MUSIC] Welcome back to course 7: Being a Professional. We're in the final week of this course where we're going to look at continuing to develop as a professional. Lecture one, today, is about reflection and self assessment, and gallsity. 'What's reflection?' is an important question. Many people advocate that teachers should be reflective practitioners. Reflection, really, is about thinking on a fairly regular basis about what we do, how we do it, but most importantly why we do it. We can lose sight of these important questions in the day to day hurly burly of being a teacher. You also need to think about what's working for you at the moment and what evidence do you have to support this assumption. This can then lead to improvement and changes to a teaching practice. I've provided something from a source in Queensland on the benefits of critical reflection, which goes into this in more detail. But just to summarize, the potential is there to improve your practice, to strive towards excellence in teaching, and ultimately to improve educational outcomes for students. Critically reflecting on your teaching has a number of advantages. You can regularly evaluate the approaches to teaching and learning that you are implementing and how effective they are. You can also understand more about the positive impacts of high quality, or effective pedagogies on children's learning. We can become more aware of the importance of some of the interactions with colleagues and students, including strategic interventions that we might implement in the school. And we could also have conversations with colleagues as part of this critical reflection which could help us maximize students' learning. Critical reflection is also very suitable to action learning. A technique that we drew upon in the previous lecture. Here we can implement effective teaching strategies to help children learn when our existing methods may have failed. Critical reflection also helps us to co-construct learning with children and other partners so it's responsive to the child's family and community. These collaborative discussions are all part of the process of thinking about what we do as a profession. What critical reflection involves is outlined for you. But really, it's about analyzing your own learning, and your own teaching practices, that can contribute to effective pedagogies. Within the context or the framework of an effective curriculum. Some of the things we need to know about are to do with our understanding children and how they learn, about the importance of building partnerships, about the importance of establishing flexible learning environments, about the importance of creating contexts for learning that are effective, and about exploring what children learn. I've provided there for you a cycle of questioning that's the basis of what you use at the University of Melbourne. Is to do with clinical judgement. And it takes us through the sort of deep thinking that we need to engage in periodically. If we begin in the top right hand corner, one of our first questions is, what is the learner ready to learn, and what evidence supports this? Within there you need to consider what is the possible evidence or research-based interventions that might be useful to move this learning forward? We then need to consider which teaching strategies are preferred and how they'll be implemented in the classroom. And then before we implement those strategies, what is the expected impact on learning and how will this be evaluated? Finally, once the intervention takes place, what happened and how can this be interpreted? Once we've been through that cycle, we're then ready to start again. With what is the learner ready to learn and what evidence supports this? Thus we set up a cycle of deep thinking about our practice, and this can occur at the level of the individual student, to groups of students and more broadly. Self-assessment is about periodically making a judgment about our performance. We can do this using professional teaching standards frameworks as a basis. We can also do it individually or with our colleagues. We need to reflect on the feedback that we've received from our colleagues and supervisors as part of this process. Self assessment against standards or against the expectations for the role then assist us in determining our goals. And it's useful to think, at least in terms of the next 12 months to three years, as a general cycle. For example, what are the areas I need to work on to strengthen in my teaching? What are the areas, possibly, where I'm already reasonably strong, but I can develop even further? How am I going to achieve that development? Who is going to assist? Where will the knowledge come from? How will I know I'm being successful? This is all part of a process of reflection, self assessment, and goal setting that professionals need to undertake. You also need to think about your longer term goals. Some of these will be life goals and some will be career goals. Where do you hope to be in several years time. For example, are you thinking about the possibility of applying for promotion? Are you thinking about the possibility of undertaking a higher degree, which may take your career in a different direction? So it was one of those short-term goals. There are also important longer-term goals that we can lose sight of if we don't continually go back and refresh it ourselves in terms of our thinking about our career and our life. Without regular self assessment and goal setting, it's very easy to be swamped in the day to day of what happens in the school. And it is possible to get to the end of the year and realize that not much has been achieved in terms of your overall career progressional development. In our next session, we're going to look at the important issue of gaining and utilizing feedback from others. [MUSIC]
