Encouraging reflective practice for ourselves and our students

#CdnELTchat summary for June 25, 2019 by Bonnie Nicholas

A small but mighty group of ELT gathered on Twitter on the last Tuesday in June to reflect and discuss questions around reflective practice. These are the questions that guided our discussion:

Q1: What does reflective practice mean to you? What does a reflective classroom community look like?

Q2: What are some ways to weave reflective practices into our daily routine? How much time should we spend in reflection? What’s the best timeline for reflection – daily? weekly? moments throughout the day? How can we find (or make) time for reflection for ourselves with all the demands being placed on us?

Q3: How can we guide students to become reflective learners? What are some strategies you use that help guide student reflection? What are some obstacles and possible solutions to student reflections in your class?

Q4: Is it best to do reflective practice individually (eg. keeping a journal to write reflections on our teaching practice) or with others (eg. debriefing with colleagues to reflect on our teaching practice)? Or, if one isn’t better than the other, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches?

Q5: What are two things in your practice that are working for you? Looking back, how did you grow as an educator this year?

Q6: Looking ahead, what is something in your practice that you think you should either change or let go in the following year? What professional activities, resources or relationships do you need to have access to in order to make these changes?

You can find the collected tweets on Wakelet: https://wke.lt/w/s/3hudfv. Thanks to Jennifer Chow for keeping the questions coming during the chat. Special thanks to Augusta Avram for finding and sharing some articles on reflective practice to get the conversation started. You’ll find the links in the archived tweets. 

The #CdnELTchat team will be taking a break during the summer months. @jennifermchow, @ELTAugusta, @EALstories, and @StanzaSL will be back in the fall with more Tuesday evening chats. In the meantime, please contact any of us if you have any ideas for topics or questions, or if you’re interested in helping with the chats.  As well, our Padlet is always open for comments: https://padlet.com/BonnieJean/CdnELTchat. And of course, please continue to tweet your ideas and links using the #CdnELTchat hashtag. Happy summer!