Collaborative and reflective professional development

Abstract

Seven experienced university teachers who already required reflective journal writing from their students undertook an innovative experiment in which they made the same demand of themselves, with their own continuing professional development (CPD) in mind. Six of them received and considered confidential facilitative comments upon each journal written, provided by the seventh member, who had had experience of this form of facilitation. An original feature of the pilot was for the facilitator to act as a primus inter pares, genuinely compiling his own reflective journal with his own CPD in mind, and offering it for comment, in return for each incoming journal. The teachers' experiences and reactions to these are reported, together with their suggestions for refinement of this scheme.

Students as co‐creators of teaching approaches, course design, and curricula: implications for academic developers

“…Reflective and collaborative approaches to professional development (Cowan & Westwood, 2006) and faculty learning communities (Richlin & Cox, 2004) have become models of good practice. Yet, student involvement in faculty development practices has been 'virtually invisible' (Cox & Sorenson, 2000, p. 99;Sorenson, 2001).…”

Noteworthy matters for attention in reflective journal writing

“…Their widely acclaimed suggestions have been followed in educational programmes and schemes for professional development (Bourner, 2003; Williams and Grudnoff, 2011). Reflection is well established as an essential component of lifelong learning and professional development (Cowan and Westwood, 2006; Davis, 2003; Findlay et al, 2010; Jay and Johnson, 2002; Moon, 2004; Zeichner and Liston, 1996). It is taken here as thinking in which a learner identifies and seeks an answer to a question whose answer, preferably in generalised form, is likely to be of practical use to them.…”

“…Facilitators can nurture the reflective learning through pointedly encouraging learners to seek counter examples, and expose and resolve contradictions, doubts and dilemmas (Zeichner and Liston, 1996). This can occur through interactive facilitation (Cowan and Westwood, 2006; Ghaye and Ghaye, 1998; Harrison et al, 2005), reflective conversations (Bold and Chambers, 2009) unlocking access to individual learning (Canning and Callan, 2010), critical questioning on ways of working and power relationships, strong personal mentor/mentee relationships (O’Connell and Dyment, 2011) and the facilitation of sophisticated reflection on reflection, or meta-reflection.…”

“…Bolton (2005) advocated encouraging journal writers to discover and resolve their personal learning needs, by questioning, exploring and analysing personal experience (Cowan and Westwood, 2006). Smyth (1989) had proposed a 4-stage framework, apparently abstracted without attribution from Zeichner and Liston’s (1985) work on supervision and without provision for active experimentation to validate chosen conclusions:…”

Teacher Development in Higher Education in an EFL Context: Why Evaluate and How to Evaluate?

“…As these styles range from the individual to the collaborative style, a suitable environment could accommodate both. In some research studies, teachers embarked on issuing reflective journals to verify the effectiveness of their practice and they passed these personal writings to be evaluated by peers (Cowan & Westwood, 2006). In this respect, reported instructional and classroom experiences were compiled and evaluation comments were subjective and objective.…”