I have now been keeping my journal for a couple of weeks and thought I would just make some comments on my initial feeling about it. As like many of you I could see the possible benefits of doing this but was unsure if and how it would change the way in which I worked. As I mentioned before I work in a secondary school and divide my time between the art and technology departments, because technology is not as relevant to this course as the work that I do in the art department I started by just keeping a journal of my days teaching art. Very quickly I realised that a lot of the issues I face in the art department were the same as the ones in technology and so kept a journal of both. As I have only been working as a teaching assistant for about 9 months one of my biggest issues is try to get the students to respect you enough to listen to you when you give them advice and when you ask them to do something. Discipline is a big issue in our school and am often taken aback and left speechless by the way that some of the students speak to members of staff. I quickly learnt that not pulling them up on things like this makes the situation worse and they lose even more respect for you, but at the same time you have to be able to remain level headed and try to avoid just screaming at them as they will just switch off. This has been something that I am still working on but have found that sitting down after the event and writing about it from different perspectives, in particular the perspective of the child has really helped me. Looking back on it has also helped me to pick up on patterns of behaviour from certain children and has help me to analyse how I have handled certain situations. Highlighting where I went wrong and how I should approach the situation next time.
I am sure that this technique will have many other benefits but at the moment this is one of the major things I am struggling with and as a result am working hardest to improve.
I think that writing from different perspectives is such a good way to go about things because I think it makes you consciously aware of why you and others are doing the things you are doing. It also makes you aware of how the way you are behaving may been seen by others and how their responses may be prompted by their interpretation of your behaviour. By becoming aware of these things I think you are able to understand the situation much more clearly as a whole and therefore change the way you deal with it accordingly. Whether its in teaching, performing or other professions when you really tune in to why other people are doing things and how the way they view you impacts those things I think you end up in a really strong position.
ReplyDeleteKolb talks about this ability to generalise things you have learnt from experience. Its great to reflect on a practice, identify where it went wrong and hope that if a next time came along, exactly the same as the first, then you can learn from your mistakes and improve! My experiences tell me that life rarely follows that pattern of identical experiences.
ReplyDeleteSo, the ability to generalise is really valuable in this process. we look for things in common, in some ways like our brain knows that a chair is a chair, even though every chair we see is slightly different. Reflection can apply that broader concept to experiences and practices at work. You might do this by explicitly remembering particular instances or simply working out what things you did worked and how they might work in this situation
As I mentioned in my post about my journal writing exercise the task of relaying your experience from another person’s perspective was probably the most useful part of the exercise for me, it is very easy especially in the job that I am in to assume that the educator is in the right and the student is in the wrong because they supposable know more, they have more ‘concrete experiences’ but by trying to approach a situation from their perspective you can start to understand why they came to that conclusion or why they might have ended up in this situation. I believe that this is also an important skill for artists to refine, if you were to look at a piece of your work from the perspective of the viewer, the critic you might be able to anticipate what criticisms they might make and change them before they have the opportunity make them.
ReplyDeleteReflection is something that we should all inadvertently do, we are constantly analysing ourselves and our action. I don’t think anybody can look back on any given situation and say that they wouldn’t change a thing. If they actually make the conscious decision to learn and change because of these realisations is a different matter. I think Peter is right in that we should take our existing knowledge and understanding and adapt it so that it may help us in many different situations. I believe that this is one of the key concepts of reflection. As Peter says no two situations is ever exactly the same so if you are unable to take what you have learnt from one situation and apply it to a similar on the there is no point identifying the issue in the first place.
Hi Stephie - found your blog entries re discipline in school really interesting because I could really empathise with what you had to say. I have posted a blog myself to discuss the issues you raise using an experience of my own. I hope you will find time to read it and get back to me with your thoughts.
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