Reflecting on your practice

A few months ago I was invited to do an interview for a Saudi Television company. I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to keynote a conference on technology enhanced learning, but for the interview I ended up talking about reflective practice and pedagogy. One of the key points I made was that reflection on practice is important for every teacher to adopt, because thinking critically about what has occurred while you are teaching, and considering ways to improve your decision making skills are essential elements of any form of your professional practice.

Something that is less easy to achieve is reflection in practice. When you are in the thick of it, it is often important to consider what is happening and perhaps change tack, if what you are doing isn't working as well as you expected. This might mean changing your method, introducing a different activity or resources, or actually scrapping your lesson plan and doing something completely different. It's not easy when you are focused on what you are doing, but it is worthwhile never the less. I pointed out that reflection on and in practice are often catalysts to do some action research. I also discussed the idea that blogging and other technology tools can support teachers as they attempt to reflect on their practice.

I hope you find this video interview useful - it also includes subtitles in Arabic for anyone who requires them.



Photo courtesy of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Public Education Development Project


Reflecting on your practice by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.