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CTE - Reflective Teaching

This guide provides resources and best practices for fauclty engaged in reflective teaching. These include resources on creating a teaching portfolio and teaching philosophy.

 

When gathering feedback on your teaching, it is often easy for faculty members to overlook their own assessments, reflections, and observations. While you want to account for the feedback of your students, peers, and chair, you should not forget about your thoughts, notes, and comments on your teaching.

 

You probably have already started the process of self assessment:

  • notes you wrote on a lesson, assignment, or activity
  • changes you made to the course materials, syllabi, and assessments
  • discussions you had with colleagues, chairs, alumni, and students

 

In each of these scenarios, you were engaged in reflecting on your approach to teaching and learning, and each of these interactions helped to shape, change, and improve your teaching. 

Formal Self Assessments

From these informal reflections, you will want to progress to more formal self-assessment practices:

 

Teaching journal. This low-tech solution will help you to keep daily or weekly track of your teaching progress. In your journal, you will want to briefly discuss the lesson, what worked, and what you'd do differently. You may want to make specific notes for syllabi, lesson, or assessment revisions. In addition to these daily or weekly observations, you will to also think big picture: 

  • how did my approach align to my teaching philosophy?
  • how did I employ best practices? 
  • did I implement something I learned in my professional development?
  • how am I building relationships / engaging my students?

 

Video recording. Recording yourself teaching provides you with "front row" seat to your classroom. You can take time to evaluation your speaking tone, delivery style, body language, student engagement and much more. It's important that you are not embarrassed to watch yourself teach and that you do not judge yourself too harshly. The purpose here is to help you see yourself the way others see you, including the positive things you do in the classroom. Visit the CTE to check out our recording hardware like the Swivl.

 

Teaching portfolio. The teaching portfolio allows you to formalize these aspects of your self assessment and provide a holistic narrative for your approach to teaching and learning. Using student, peer, chair, and self assessment, you will create a portfolio that documents your teaching progress.  A teaching portfolio gives you many opportunities to reflect on individual aspects of your teaching, such as your teaching goals, professional interactions, teaching materials, and student artifacts.

 

Click on teaching portfolios on the  navigation bar to learn more about how to document your reflective teaching practices.