Assessment has to be
about more than simply generating information about my students to report to
parents on a report card. The information I gathered about my students had to
do something for me and my students. In order to do so, I had to do something
with this information. I needed to learn how to use this information to make
better instructional decisions and to design more effective lessons and
learning experiences in my reading workshop. This led me to investigate the
concept of reflection, reflective practices and how to assume the role of
“teacher as researcher.”
Much of my understanding of reflective practice came from the early
work of John Dewey. In How We Think,
Dewey described reflective practice as an, "active, persistent, and
careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light
of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.”
The grounds that support our instructional and curricular decisions are based
on the information we generate through the assessment windows we utilize. This
seemed to be the connection between assessment and instruction I was looking
for.
Reflective practice begins with a perceived uncertainty, a nagging
sense of doubt, and ends with a judgment or action. These “uncertainties” or
doubts do not appear ready-made for the teacher, rather they are created or
“framed” from the experiences one encounters in the classroom. In other words,
through careful, extended observations we determine the challenges or
uncertainties we will need to address and the information we will need to
generate to make more informed instructional decisions. In order to create more
effective learning experiences, we need to identify an area of the curriculum
to focus on, gather and generate relevant information, and learn how to use
this information to make sound instructional decisions. In other words, the
information we generate must work to inform our instructional practices.
In addition, Dewey wrote about the concept of “suspending
conclusions”, describing this as the ability of teachers to resist the
temptation to jump to premature judgments, and to carefully weigh the evidence
provided and the consequences of one’s actions before making instructional
decisions. In order for this to occur, teachers needed to generate enough
relevant data to make effective decisions. This is where classroom-based
assessment comes in. Reflective practitioners are knowledgeable teachers that
generate information, act according to their best judgments, suspend their
conclusions, but also understand that knowledge is tentative and open to change
when new information comes to light.
For Dewey, the purpose of reflective practice was to change
teachers’ actions and their processes of arriving at instructional decisions.
If reflection did not lead to action, it was simply a waste of time. Without
action being taken after reflection has occurred, teachers are simply
reflecting for the sake of reflecting and not using their new understandings to
improve their teaching practices. In this sense, the value of assessment and
reflection is in its usefulness to
the teacher and the student, not as an isolated mental activity. In other
words, if we don’t use the information we generate about our students to inform
our instruction, we are simply "navel-gazing".
In summary, reflective practice is an active stance a teacher assumes towards his or her practice.
Reflective teachers view the experiences in their classroom as open to inquiry,
are able to suspend judgments in order to question why they do what they do,
use the information they generate about students to critically examine the
learning experiences they create in their classrooms and make the necessary
changes in their instructional practices and learning environments.
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