Lindsay Jordan & John O’Reilly
This session I knew would be a really important one for me, given that we would be covering the ‘case studies’. But first we started about understanding reflection.
We worked in groups (Myself, Sakiko, Dee, Mathew) we were presented with a series of academic texts that we should each research, evaluate and reflect upon. I took the ‘Moon, J. (1999). Reflection in Learning and Professional Development : Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis’. We each had 30 minutes to read. I admit that I struggle to read on screen and absorb the information, but I made a big effort to read and aim to evaluate it. It was probably the least digestible of the 4 texts to chose; and of the the first two chapters, I only managed to read the first one. In this chapter Moon, addresses views on reflection and discusses how Morrison (1996) writes that within teacher training, reflection is ‘a conceptual and methodological portmanteau‘. She goes on to discuss how defining the word reflection can often be difficult and too broad and depending on the context it can range from highly theoretical to pragmatic. Sometimes we can be unconsciously reflective when we say ‘let me reflect on this’. Moon also writes that we reflect for a purpose and that this can lead to a useful outcome and goes on to suggest that when applied to processes, the act of reflection is more likely considered to be “thinking” or “recalling”. I then read about applying the term ‘reflect’ to anticipated outcomes applied to complex or less structured ideas … at this point I felt my brain fry a bit. I found the ambiguity in Moon’s writing wasn’t giving me the clues to generate a conclusion – which I was hoping I would be able to do. I tried to create a visual map of how it might work. But I didn’t find this helped…
I realised then that it was ok to not form a conclusion from reading a small section of a book and be able to evaluate it in such short timeframe. Accepting this, I continued to read Moon, and how she explores reflection in a broader manner. Moon explores how other writers (Van Manen, Level of Reflection ( 1977) and Schön, Reflection In and On Action (1983) considers categorisations, of ‘capturing’ reflection to understand a more pedagogic language for use in academia. She surmises that this isn’t always useful in common, everyday use of language and considers that if you apply this to, for an example a child who reflects on what they did when they last played with their favourite toy, this suggests that reflection could actually be a much simpler activity than the ‘portmanteau‘.
Once we had completed the 30 minutes reading, we feedback our understanding to our group and summarising key points from the pieces we had read. As I didn’t finish the Moon piece, I would suggest that the key point was that act of reflection is regularly a simple act and doesn’t have to be portrayed by complex language, but the act can be demonstrated and evidenced in significant theory for academic use.
Moving on from this, we worked in pairs to discuss and review our blogs. At this point my blog was still embryonic (ie barely started) as I found the WordPress interface to be more complicated than I had hoped. Sakiko was also at a similar stage. So we were fairly clueless and not able to help each other, which could have been funny but with time of the essence, I’m confident in saying that we felt stressed about it. Lindsay offered some help, showing us how to change themes and this suddenly enabled me to edit & upload my blogs. PHEW. I had developed my workflow pages. This is a platform I know well (it is used to record all student uploads on the foundation at CSM) and I was very confident in showing Sakiko what I had created – I offered to help her with her workflow & we agreed a date to meet. I also suggested that she contact Amy Urry, a colleague of mine (Amy and Sarah Leontovistch are the workflow and Moodle specialists on the Foundation course), to get some help with technical issues with workflow.
In the afternoon, Lindsay introduced the case studies that we need to produce as part of our assessment criteria. There are 3 clear titles for the pieces, Designing and Planning, Teaching and Support, and, Assessment and Feedback.
We were given a template, an example of a case study and asked to pick one and start to generate notes surrounding the case study. I found this quite difficult to start, even though there were Padlet’s (online/digital platform that is a great tool for storing information and feedback to students, and also enabling students to interact and upload work and feedback – this was an essential digital tool during the pandemic) to support each of the themes, which offered some interesting discussion points. I selected the Assessment and Feedback case study as I felt it may be the most challenging for me. Catherine Smith had sent me an article on Feedback Literacy after she had observed me teaching a session. This offered some insightful thinking about feedback, which I made notes on. Further to this I had an online tutorial with Catherine (Smith) 08.03.2023 and we discussed the case studies in greater detail, which made writing the studies an easier process.