Tap into What They’ve Learned

Take a closer look

Reflection Gives Educators a Chance to Tap into What They’ve Learned

By Joan Richardson

Tools for Schools, April 2002

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2002. All rights reserved.

Watch yourself the next time you rush past a full-length mirror. What do you see? Perhaps you get a quick impression of the color of your clothes or your hair and whether you’re carrying something in your arms.

Now, stand close to the mirror. What do you see? What is reflected back to you is a fairly clear image of yourself. You can see exactly which outfit you’ve chosen to wear that day, whether hairs are out of place, and whether that bundle in your arms is a load of books or a small child.

Step forward. Look again. Do you see yourself more clearly? Can you see the thread that is dangling from the end of your sleeve or the titles of some of those books in your arms?

Such is the process and the value of reflection: the closer you look, the more you can learn about yourself.

In the rush-rush of everyday life, most educators are like the person who moves too quickly past the mirror. There is barely enough time to ascertain the large details of the image. But, with each effort to move in closer, the picture becomes more detailed.

At the heart of reflection is the belief that, given opportunities to carefully consider their work, educators possess the necessary knowledge to improve their practice. Reflection is the process through which educators tap into that knowledge.

“It’s the ability to look back and make sense of what happened and what you learned. But it’s also the ability to look forward, to anticipate what’s coming up and what you need to do to prepare for that,” said Bill Sommers, executive director of teacher and instructional services for the Minneapolis Public Schools. Sommers is also one of the co-authors of Reflective Practice to Improve Schools: An Action Guide for Educators (Corwin Press, 2001).

Sommers and his co-authors say reflection requires:

• A deliberate pause, a purposeful slowing down to find time for a close look; • A willingness to be open to other points of view; • Consciously processing your thoughts; • Examining beliefs, goals, and practices; and

• Gaining new insights and understanding.

To say that you have engaged in “reflective practice,” however, requires the additional step of taking action with what you have learned through the process of reflection, say the authors.

Reflection is an element in all inquiry-focused professional learning, such as action research, examining student work, classroom observation and feedback, and lesson study. Without reflection, few of those activities would generate the intended learning.

Reflection’s many forms

Reflection can take many forms and involve almost any number of people. Reflection can be personal, done in small groups, schoolwide, districtwide and even throughout the community that supports a school district. After the Sept. 11 events, for example, there seemed to an almost spontaneous nationwide reflection about values and ideals.

Personal reflection

Even without the support of others, educators can engage in individual reflection.

Personal reflection can be as simple as clearing your head of distracting details and focusing on a single topic for a short period of time. Or it can be as formal as keeping a reflective journal. Such a journal can be kept in a traditional notebook or you can create a personal electronic journal. One of the values of the written journal is that educators can return to those reflections later to learn not only what they were thinking at the time but how they’ve changed over time.

Creating a time-out for reflection is essential, Sommers said. “To do this effectively, you have to literally schedule reflection into your daily schedule,” he said.

Sommers said it is especially important that principals model this aspect of reflective behavior for their staffs. As difficult as this might be, Sommers said there are numerous ways that principals can find time for personal reflection. A principal can go into his or her office and turn off the lights for the time needed for private reflection. He recalled one principal who left the building each day to go to a nearby coffee shop and write in his journal. “He just got out of the fire for 15 minutes every day,” Sommers said.

Educators who are embarking on personal reflection may need a set of prompts to get them going. Several tools are provided in the original and PDF versions of this issue of Tools (in the Comprehensive Members area).

Small group reflection

Because educators spend a great deal of time in meetings, Sommers and his co-authors recommend that groups spend time reflecting on the meeting process itself. Setting group

norms, for example, is one way groups can reflect upon the expectations that participants have about meeting together.

In Reflective Practice, the authors recommend numerous reflective questions intended to improve the quality of meeting time.

• What is this purpose of this group? What is the focus for learning? What are the desired outcomes? Which students are likely to benefit from the learning that occurs within this group?

• How structured will the group process need to be to address the given purpose? Is there a specific time frame that must be honored? What kind of design will best promote participation, learning, and accomplishment?

• Do group members know one another well? If not, how can we explicitly focus on developing relationships and trust?

• What experience do members have with reflection and learning? How intentional do we need to be about developing individual and group capacities for reflecting, learning, and working together?

• How will we determine the effectiveness of the group process? What content and process reflection strategies might we use?

Whole school reflection

Principals are the key to ensuring that an entire staff regularly engages in reflection.

“I know this may sound corny and maybe it’s kind of overused, but in this case, it’s really true: You have to be the change that you want to see. If principals want their staffs to become more reflective, then principals have to become more reflective first,” said Sommers, who was a middle and high school principal before moving to district administration.

Besides attending to their own personal reflection, Sommers said principals can model reflective behavior in daily exchanges with teachers. “Principals are in motion in a school. But they can still model this in the drive-by conversations that they have with teachers,” Sommers said. That means thinking carefully about the questions they pose and ensuring that they take time to listen carefully to the responses.

Principals also can set aside time during staff meetings to teach teachers how to reflect alone, in pairs, with mentors, and in small groups (such as grade-level or teachers who teach similar subjects). This staff development time could include many lessons, such as how to maintain a reflective journal, how to write a case study, how to assemble a portfolio about their practice, how to collect and reflect upon data, or how to design an action research project.

Principals also can buy bound journals for each teacher as a concrete expression of their interest in having teachers spend more time reflecting and writing about their practice.

Principals can begin staff meetings by posting a question that they want each teacher to address briefly in their journals. They can ask teachers to share those reflections aloud, either with a partner or the entire group.

For Sommers, reflection is the crucial element that’s often missing in school change efforts. “The bottom line is we’re not going to get better at our craft if we don’t figure out some way to spend time in reflection. It has the potential to change schools. I know it can because I’ve seen it happen,” Sommers said.