Becoming critically reflective in teaching - a personal journey

Moving countries and moving schools have meant a change in the environment in which I teach in. This has been difficult and has allowed me to reflect on why I teach the way I do. 

But should I be reflective? Should I as an educator challenge or question what, why or how I am teaching? Should I just focus on teaching the curriculum set out in the textbook or is teaching more than this? One of the hardest things I have learnt as a teacher is that even though I have the sincerest of intentions, this does not always translate to what happens in the classroom. Teaching is complex and when the power dynamics of student and staff relationships are then put into the mix, teaching becomes less than straight forward. It is my opinion that by not considering the complex nature of the profession, creates the idea that I can always understand exactly what it is that I'm doing and what effect I'm having. However, this assumes that the meanings and significance I place on my teaching are the same as those my students take from my lessons. I think such thinking is naïve. I struggle to see where you grow and develop as an educator using such an approach. I rarely have full awareness of what I'm doing, teaching without critical reflection sets me up for a lifetime of frustration as a teacher. Using the former approach I would be unable to control what is happening to my students and this would provide evidence of my incompetence. Without critical reflection, I would accept the blame for problems that have nothing to do with me. I would think that the challenges in the classroom are caused by my own unpreparedness. I would hear poor feedback of my teaching and immediately conclude that I am a hopeless failure. I would become depressed when ways of behaving towards students and colleagues that I think are democratic and respectful are interpreted as arrogant or manipulative. An approach involving critical reflection might not win me a promotion. But it would increase the chances that I would survive in the classroom with enough energy and sense of purpose to have some real effect on those I teach. 

One critical feature of reflection is its focus on assumptions. Assumptions are the taken for granted beliefs about the world, and our place within it, that seem so obvious to us as not to need to be stated explicitly. Assumptions give meaning and purpose to who we are and what we do. Becoming aware of assumptions that frame how we think and act is something we resist, for fear of what we might discover. Some assumptions I have held as a teacher are that students should be self-directed learners, that critical thinking is the most important intellectual skill and that the classroom should be democratic.

These assumptions then lead on to further assumptions. For example, my belief that students should be self-directed learners then made me assume that the best teaching is that which encourages students to take control over designing, conducting and evaluating their own learning.

However, discovering and investigating assumptions was only the start of being critically reflective. I needed to work back to the more deeply embedded assumptions I held. If I take actions on the basis of assumptions that are unexamined this can lead to continuing to making poor decisions and bad judgements. I was falling into the habit of justifying what I did by reference to unchecked 'common sense' and of thinking that the unconfirmed evidence of my own eyes was always accurate and valid. 'Of course, I know what's going on in my classrooms' I said to myself, 'after all, I've been doing this for years, haven't I?'

As an example from my own teaching, it was common sense to walk around the classroom after I'd set a task since this demonstrated my commitment to helping students learn, right? Obviously, visiting the students is an example of respectful, attentive, student-centred teaching - a way of checking up to see whether they're doing what I'd told them to do. However, this could come across as insulting to students, since it implies that I don't trust them enough to do what I've asked. Students might change their behaviour during my visit as a way of impressing me with the kinds of behaviours they think I want to see. Their overwhelming concern becomes to show me what good, efficient, task-oriented students they are, rather than with thoughtfully analysing and critiquing the task at hand. Central to the reflective process was this attempt to see things differently. A reflective teacher seeks to probe beneath the veneer of a common sense reading of experience.

So what is a critical reflection? According to Zeichner (1994): 

"It has come to the point now where the whole range of beliefs about teaching, learning, schooling, and the social order have become incorporated into the discourse about reflective practice. Everyone, no matter what his or her ideological orientation, has jumped on the bandwagon at this point, and has committed his or her energies to furthering some version of reflective teaching practice" (p. 9).

Reflection is not, by definition, critical. It is quite possible to teach reflectively while focusing solely on the mechanics of classroom process. For example, I reflected about the type of assessments I used in the classroom. This decision rested on assumptions that could be identified and questioned and looked at from different perspectives, but this is not critical reflection. Reflection became critical when reflection about what the content of the students' assessments led to an investigation and questioning of the sources of authority underlying the establishment of criteria for evaluation.

Reflection became critical when it had two distinctive purposes:

1. Understanding how considerations of power frame and distort learning and teaching.
2. Questioning assumptions and practices that seem to make our teaching lives easier but that actually end up working against our own belong-term interests. 
   

An example of critical reflection from my practise focused on delving into how power distorts the classroom learning was my approach of placing students in groups. The group was seen as a physical manifestation of democracy, a group of peers facing each other as respectful equals. Doing this, I thought respected and affirmed the value of students' experiences. It placed their voices front and centre and allowed a constructivist approach to learning. However, as Gore (1993) points out, the experience of being in a group is ambiguous. For students who are confident and used to the culture of a school, the group is an experience that is supportive, positive and authentic. But what about the students who are shy, aware of their differences to other members of that group or conscious of their lack of education? The group can be a painful and humiliating experience. These students have been stripped of their right to privacy. They have also been denied the chance to check teachers out by watching them closely before deciding whether or not they can be trusted. This trust only comes with time as teachers are seen to be consistent, honest and fair. Yet the group, with its implicit pressure to participate and perform, may preclude the time and opportunity for this trust to develop. Students in a group may feel a pressure from peers and teachers to say something, anything, just to be noticed. Whether or not they feel ready to speak, or whether or not they have anything particular they want to say, becomes irrelevant. 

This is not to suggest that I threw the groupings out and went back to teachers talking uninterruptedly at rows of desks. I continue to use  groups in my own practice. But critical reflection made me aware of the disadvantages of grouped learning and reminded me that I must continually research how it is experienced by my students. 

The second purpose of critical reflection was to uncover hegemonic assumptions. Hegemonic assumptions are assumptions that we think are in our own best interests but that actually work against us in the long term. As developed by the Italian political economist Antonio Gramsci (1978), the term hegemony describes the process whereby ideas, structures and actions come to be seen by the majority of people as wholly natural, pre-ordained and working for their own good, when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves these interests so well. The subtle cruelty of hegemony is that over time it becomes deeply embedded, part of the educational culture that people take for granted. 

Take for example, my early teaching belief that teaching is a vocation. Teaching becomes work where its practitioners are selfless servants of their calling, their students and their schools. That teachers sometimes eagerly accept concepts of vocation to justify their taking on too much is evident from Campbell and Neill's (1994) studies of teachers' work. A sense of calling becomes distorted to mean that they should deal with larger and larger numbers of students, and regularly teach larger and larger classes. And they should do all of this without complaining. As I had this idea of vocation as my organizing concept for my professional life, I began to start to think of any day on which I didn't come home exhausted was a day when I had not been all that I could be. So what seems on the surface to be a politically neutral idea on which all could agree that teaching is a vocation calling for dedication and hard work - was being interpreted by me as meaning that I should squeeze the work of two or three jobs into one. 'Vocation' thus became a hegemonic concept that seemed neutral, consensual and obvious, and that I gladly embraced, but one that ended up working against my own best interests. The concept of vocation ended up serving the interests of those who wanted to run my school efficiently and profitably while spending the least amount of money and employing the smallest number of staff that they could get away with. As I become a more critically reflective teacher, I began to stand outside my practice and see what I did from a wider perspective. I knew that curriculum content and evaluative procedures are social products that are located in time and space, and that they probably reproduce the inequities of the wider culture. I was able to distinguish between a justifiable and necessary dedication to students' well being, and becoming a self-destructive workaholic. It anchored me in a moral, intellectual and political position and gave me an organizing vision of what  I am trying to accomplish as a teacher. By prioritizing what is really important in my work a critical rationale helped keep in perspective my own tendency to translate a sense of vocation into meaning that I have to do everything asked of me. 

Choosing to become critically reflective will only began to happen when I saw clearly that it was in my own best interests. Otherwise, given the already overcrowded work life, why should I have bothered to take this activity seriously? In summary, there  have been several advantages to incorporating critical reflection into my practise.

• It helps me take informed actions. An informed action is one that has a good chance of achieving its goals. It is an action that is taken against a backdrop of inquiry into how people perceive what I say and do. 
• It helps develop a rationale for practice. It provides a sense of who I am as a teacher in an examined reality. I know why I believe what I believe, I am able communicate to colleagues and students the rationale behind my practice.
• It helps me avoid guilt and always blaming myself. Critical reflection systematically investigates how my students are experiencing learning. I know that many problems in the classroom are socially and politically sculpted. Realizing this, helps me make a healthier, more realistic appraisal of my own role in, or responsibility for what happens in the classroom. 
• It grounds me emotionally. When I clarify and question my assumptions, and when I research my students, I have the sense that the classroom can be explained and their are reasons for why things occur which I can help change. 
• It enlivens my classroom. Students put great store by my actions and they learn a great deal from observing how I model intellectual inquiry and democratic process. Given that this is so, I activate my classroom by providing a model of passionate scepticism. Modelling critical inquiry into my own practice is one of the most powerful catalysts for critical thinking in my own students. For this reason, if for no other, engaging in critical reflection is the most important indicator I look for in any attempt to judge teachers' effectiveness.
• It increases democratic trust. What I do as a teacher makes a difference in the world. The ways I encourage or inhibit students' questions, the kinds of reward systems I create, and the degree of attention I pay to their concerns, all create a classroom culture. I know something about the effects I am having on students. I am alert to the presence of power in my classrooms and to its possibilities for misuse. 

References:

Campbell, R. J., & Neill, S. R. S. J. (1994). Secondary teachers at work. Taylor & Francis.

Gore, J. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. Psychology Press.

Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from political writings (1921-1926) (Vol. 1). International Publishers.

Zeichner, K. M. (1994). Research on teacher thinking and different views of reflective practice in teaching and teacher education. Teachers’ minds and actions: Research on teachers’ thinking and practice, 9-27.