Reflective Practice
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
OLUBUNMI COKER
Flipping through a pile of handouts on the theries of learning, none seemed to offer a straight-jacked answer to the scenario that had occurred in the class that day. My mentor had been approached and rudely told off by a student that morning that all she does in the class is shout at the top of her voice and set the class in disarray. You can imagine how bad she felt. And I certainly did sympathise with her but at the same time, the incidence at hand gave me something to go home and really think about, and at the same time rained insight on the importance of reflective practice to the student teacher.
Boud, Keogh & Walker (1996p34 ) paint reflective practice in a light that was 100% relevant to me at that point in time, in the following words:
Reflection is a form of response of a learner to experience…Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. That I certainly did that day. Unlike the old English adage that states ‘let sleeping dogs lay, my mentor made mention of the episode time and again as I dare to say it certainly left her with a ‘scar’.
Here was a first hand experience, rather strange to me as I left the classroom over a decade ago in a completely different culture where students virtually fear their tutors (due to the barbaric power of the cane) only to hear a ‘Miss prim and proper virtually give her tutor a bad name.
The trend of events of that day certainly knocked out Boud, Keogh & Walker second opinion of reflective practice equally expressed on page 34 of the same book. This presents it … as a stage in the learning process which occures after substantial other activity has taken place, towards the latter part of a one semester course, for instance… My last three months in college have certainly made it clear to me that reflective is not some sort of last minute gimmics. There are real events, in a real world that
OLUBUNMI COKER
Flipping through a pile of handouts on the theries of learning, none seemed to offer a straight-jacked answer to the scenario that had occurred in the class that day. My mentor had been approached and rudely told off by a student that morning that all she does in the class is shout at the top of her voice and set the class in disarray. You can imagine how bad she felt. And I certainly did sympathise with her but at the same time, the incidence at hand gave me something to go home and really think about, and at the same time rained insight on the importance of reflective practice to the student teacher.
Boud, Keogh & Walker (1996p34 ) paint reflective practice in a light that was 100% relevant to me at that point in time, in the following words:
Reflection is a form of response of a learner to experience…Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. That I certainly did that day. Unlike the old English adage that states ‘let sleeping dogs lay, my mentor made mention of the episode time and again as I dare to say it certainly left her with a ‘scar’.
Here was a first hand experience, rather strange to me as I left the classroom over a decade ago in a completely different culture where students virtually fear their tutors (due to the barbaric power of the cane) only to hear a ‘Miss prim and proper virtually give her tutor a bad name.
The trend of events of that day certainly knocked out Boud, Keogh & Walker second opinion of reflective practice equally expressed on page 34 of the same book. This presents it … as a stage in the learning process which occures after substantial other activity has taken place, towards the latter part of a one semester course, for instance… My last three months in college have certainly made it clear to me that reflective is not some sort of last minute gimmics. There are real events, in a real world that
References: http://www.nsdc.org/library/publications/jsd/wood203.cfm www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm. Smith, M. K. (2001) 'David A. Kolb on experiential learning ', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/b-explrn.htm.