As educators, we often wonder how we’re doing in the classroom, but remain unsure how to best measure our progress or identify areas for improvement. To address this very question, Rebecca Miller Brown, Assistant Director for Graduate Student Programming at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, led GHELI’s cohort of Teaching Fellows (TFs) through a workshop centered on “Becoming a Critically Reflective Practitioner.” The workshop explored Stephen Brookfield’s lenses for reflective teaching, which guided TFs to consider four main perspectives: the self, the student, the colleague, and the scholarship.
Beginning with the perspective of the self, TFs reflected on their goals for their own teaching and brainstormed ways to gauge their progress toward achieving their goals. From the student perspective, TFs compared and contrasted different classroom assessment techniques and talked through different ways to learn from their students. Moving onto the colleague perspective, TFs worked in small groups to discuss the classroom observation that Bok Pedagogy Fellow, Elizabeth Hentschel, and Senior Scholar, Terry Aladjem, co-led in the previous weeks. The cohort spoke to what they learned from the observations and the changes they made to their teaching post-observation.