Typing Out Loud

Every spring semester I teach a soup-to-nuts ePortfolio development class to graduate students in FIT’s Art Market Program, and every spring the word, reflection, assumes a more prominent role in my vocabulary. According to a paper by Neil Haigh from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, “reflection” is one of those words that is used, for the most part, pretty non-reflectively - which strikes a little too close to home. Drawing from Donald Schon’s concept of the “reflective practitioner”, Haigh develops a definition of reflection that is concise and all his own: thinking about an experience with the intention of deciding what it means, how it can be explained and what the meaning and explanations might imply for the future.

Haigh goes on to describes what he feels are the attributes of effective teachers, and how the act of reflection is central to those attributes. I’ll quote this in full because I find his list so compelling:

I assume that teachers who are best equipped to facilitate their students’ learning have the following attributes:

• a rich repertoire of teaching methods and skills
• sensitivity to factors that make particular ways of teaching more or less appropriate
• good control of specific teaching skills
• awareness that the choices that they make concerning teaching and learning objectives and approaches are shaped by their beliefs about the primary purposes of education
• They can make those beliefs explicit and teach in ways that fit these purposes. In this sense their teaching is ‘educative’ (Haigh and Katterns, 1984: 23 - 7).

The capacity to research teaching rests, in part, on a capacity for reflection. Awareness of the manner in which beliefs shape choices is founded in reflection.

Higher education teaching suffers, in America, from not being thought of or even practiced as a profession - with requisite craft, experience, skills and introspection. In talking about what’s needed to be an effective teacher, Haigh does an awfully good job of summing up what’s missing.