Principle 5. Teaching as Reflective Practice
Reflect on your teaching practices and beliefs to maximize self-awareness and continual improvement.
Growth as an effective and inclusive instructor is a continual process involving self-reflection, critique, and ongoing learning. Self-reflection includes identifying personal areas of bias or weakness in teaching. One’s beliefs about students, teaching and learning feed directly into how one practices teaching. Engaging in a reflective practice ensures that our beliefs, values, and practices are in alignment through continual growth and adjustment.
Instructors, students, disciplinary norms, and the state of the pedagogical art evolve constantly, so even the best-prepared and skillful instructor is only such at a moment in time. Successful instructors model life-long learning for their students through their own engagement with their discipline, their teaching, and the ever-evolving student populations in their courses.
Resources for Teaching as Reflective Practice
Strategies Shortlist
- Reflect on current portfolio of pedagogical strategies when preparing any course, even ones that have worked successfully on multiple occasions.
- Incorporate regular informal feedback from students and adapt pedagogical approaches to best support student success.
- Reflect on how to set up courses to foster inclusive engagement with students.
- Proactively seek out novel approaches, activities, and resources to experiment with teaching, and conscientiously collect data to evaluate its effectiveness, including (but not limited to) professional development and feedback from students and peers.
- Stay current in disciplinary developments and disciplinary-specific best teaching practices.
- Create and participate in communities of fellow instructors that allow for support, peer review, pedagogical strategizing, and critical engagement with teaching practices.