JOELLE​PETERS

Attribute Two

 

Graduates must advance learning and teaching practice through critical self-reflection, evaluation and research.

 

The time I demonstrate most of my critical self-reflection is at the end of a course. Throughout the course I reflect on individual lessons and how they ran, but my reflection culminates at the end of a round of teaching. At this time I think about two main categories. Firstly, the content of the course and how it is delivered and myself as a lecturer and secondly how I engage with the material and my students. 

 

When thinking about the content of the course I consider my learners, who they are, what skills they need to be able to engage with the content, what sort of environments they are likely to need to learn and how will I deliver and assess the material. After thinking about these things I construct or edit an exisiting course outline, thinking back to what has worked well over the last semester and what might need changing. An example of this can be seen with my Bridging students. After the first round of teaching the course I asked the students for course feedback, particularly around how assessment was run as this was my first time developing and delivering a course. I took their feed-back on board and restructured my assessments to make them more accessible for the next intake of students. Please see the PDF 'Reflective Planning Chart' for a more detailed breakdown of my planning process. 

 

When thinking about my teaching I consider the overall tone of the classes for the past semester, my student-teacher rapport, my positionality and whether I feel a safe and secure learning environment was achieved. I assess this by looking through my student feedback on both the course and me as a teacher as well as using my colleague feedback. I also reflect on key moments throughout the semester and how I responded to them and whether my responses had the desired effect within the learning environment. An example of this, again with my bridging students, during the first intake I found myself flicking between a peerish and authoritative positionality due to the fact that there weren't many 'othering' factors between myself and my students (when students identify me as too similar to themselves they are less likely to automatically ascribe to me the authority the might to other, more 'stereotypical' lecturers). After recognising this I found that I become more aware of my positionality and found it easier to maintian an appropriate 'authoritative' position. I found students responded better to my teaching and the course overall when I used a more authoritative approach to presenting myself. 

 

I have also recently been involved in research with a colleague around positionality and our experiences with this in class. We took this research to the 2014 TERNZ conference held in Auckland and presented it there. Many of the people who came to our workshop spoke to us afterwards and were all pleased that we had given them some language to address this experience. The impetus for this research was our joint experiences with our different classes, and one particular day with a shared class. These experiences form the basis for one of my case studies.