Week 2: Sept 17 Understanding Teaching WHY SHOULD I BECOME A REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER?

EDUC 450, 451, 452: Inquiry Seminars The inquiry process across the BEd (Secondary) program consists of: Learning about teacher inquiry (EDUC 450-Inquiry 1) Preparing the inquiry proposal (EDUC 450-Inquiry 1) Developing the inquiry project (EDUC 450-Inquiry 1) Refining and Sharing the inquiry project (EDUC 451-Inquiry 2) Exploring links to practice (EDUC 451-Inquiry 2) Reflecting on the inquiry project, links to practice, ongoing questions and learning over the year (EDUC 452-Inquiry 3)

*Person First Language Please incorporate and use person first language in your oral and written language. Disabilities and differences are not persons and they do not define persons, so do not replace person-nouns with disability-nouns. Avoid using: the aphasic, the schizophrenic, stutterers, the hard of hearing. Also avoid using: autistic child, cleft palate children, the dyslexic lawyer, the developmentally disabled adult. Instead, emphasize the person, not the disability, by putting the person-noun first: the lawyer who has dyslexia, person who stutters, the children described as hard of hearing, the child with autism. (Note that people who are Deaf or hard of hearing do not consider themselves to be impaired, so this term is to be avoided.)

Reflective practice in the design studio and teacher education Leonard J. Waks The Reflective Practitioner Donald A. Schön

What is “reflective thinking”? Reflective practice Based on John Dewey’s theory on reflective thinking

Similarities and Differences: Dewey & Schön Similarities: ◦Situations are “messes”; no one technical situation can fit unique conditions Differences: DeweySchön Reflection as a meaning making process.Rejects reflection as “time out”. Reflective inquiry as “time out” from social action. Reflect-in-action. Reflect after the event.Reflect in the moment. Thinking is learned by doing.Thinking is learned while doing the activity.

Design Professions are ‘designlike’ ◦Require conceptualizing, planning, patterning, and establishing cognitive order. 3 implications for Schön: 1.Design is learnable but not didactically or discursively teachable; only learned in and through practical operations of frame experimentation 2.Design is holistic. Must be learned as a whole. Parts cannot be learned in isolation. 3.Design requires students to have the ability to recognize what does and does not work. ◦Achieved through experimentation and “in-dialogue” with materials.

Schön: teaching and teacher training 1.Didactic Teaching ◦Conveying information, teaching rules and procedures. Ex: Spelling, multiplication tables, conversion of metric system. 2.Discursive Teaching ◦Facilitating knowledge acquisition. Ex: Organizing a class debate, exploring a subject through discussion. 3.Heuristic Teaching ◦Training or coaching in the production of a rule, a plan, an outline. ◦Teaching to create. Ex: Shortcuts, problem solving, rules: WD-40 vs Duct tape.

Schön: Design and frame experimentation in lesson preparation 1.Didactic Teaching ◦Teacher presents information for memory. Learning curriculum and frameworks already out there. 2.Discursive Teaching ◦Teacher opens and encourages a discussion. ◦A pattern or design comes out of student contribution. 3.Heuristic Teaching* ◦Teacher has students learning-by-doing. ◦Students hone skills and learn for themselves.

Schön: Learning to design and learning to teach Professionals who have not learned the art of teaching-coaching: ◦“… surprisingly, they do not appear to design their lessons. Rather, they just plunge in spontaneously, guided sufficiently by their own professional arts.”

Schön: the reflective practicum ◦“The novice learns the professional art by joint experimentation with the coach, reworking and correcting the novice’s moves (the ‘joint experimentation’ mode). In either case the novice learns both how to solve the substantive problems posed in the professional practice and how to ‘negotiate the ladder of reflection’ about the practice.” ◦“He or she learns how to think and talk about the problems and how to step back from that talk for meta-consideration about it. Thus he or she learns to handle the first two tasks of coaching simply by learning the designlike profession itself.” ◦“All that remains for teacher training in professional education is learning the third interpersonal task: managing the strains specific to the initiate-novice relationship.”