Critical Reflection - Part 2

Feins et al (1996) created 5 questions to ask before you develop your course.

• Who am I teaching?
• What am I teaching?
• How will I teach it?
• How will I know if my audience has understood?
• How will I improve my teaching next time?

What if I apply this to one of the courses that I would like to find time to create soon, 'Using WebCT 6.0'.

• Who am I teaching? - Edge Hill staff and students related to various courses, who have for whatever reason gone online to look for training materials.
• What am I teaching? - How to log in, find what you need in a course, use tools, develop courses in WebCT 6.0.
• How will I teach it? - Talking and demonstrating how to do certain things, walk throughs of certain processes, advice on general things that relate to the subject (e.g. pop-up problems).
• How will I know if my audience has understood? - Perhaps links on the web pages to contact me with feedback or questions.
• How will I improve my teaching next time? - Take into consideration feedback, develop other courses to improve my skills, ask for peer review on the course related to how I 'perform' vocally, and if the material was OK.

Moving on from this example, when we write our assessment we need to meet certain criteria in relation to Critical Reflective Writing.

We should show understanding of the purpose of reflective commentary, which affects what we decide to focus our reflection on [so perhaps I could start off by discussing the importance of reflecting on the subject that I choose to reflect on, and developing that into a direction for the rest of the writing].

The description should involve:

• statement of observations
• comments on personal behaviour
• comments on reactions and feeling
• the context
• and additional ideas

The description should also demonstrate:

• an ability to work with unstructured material
• links between theory and practice
• different points of view
• the ability to 'step back'
• metacognitive processes

Finally it should demonstrate:

• new ideas tested in practice
• evidence of review and revision
• a statement of something learned/solved relating to the purpose of the description, or, a new area for further reflection or a new question.