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The How and Why of Reflective Practice for Science Museum Professionals
... It places professionals in the role of learners, learning about their own practice. As a corollary, reflective practice is integral to professional learning (Tran, 2019) because reflective practice is the process of learning from one's work experience (Dewey, 1933;Schön, 1983). The educators themselves are hungry for deepening their practice. ...
... Reflective practice is engaging in the metacognitive aspects of professional learning. It is influenced by a person's motivation, focuses on understanding and solving problems within one's practice, making change from what is learned, and is deliberately learned over time within a community (Tran, 2019). ...
... It is helpful to understand that reflection, critical reflection, and reflective practice are all related concepts (Larrivee, 2000), though they are not mutually exclusive (Fook, 2015). ISE professionals can reflect on what they do, but not make any changes in their thinking or habit from those reflections; in such cases, they are not engaging in reflective practice (Tran, 2019). Educators can engage in reflective practice, but not interrogate "beliefs, assumptions, and expectations and make visible [their] personal reflexive loops" (Larrivee, 2000, p. 296); thus, they are not engaging in critical reflection. ...
It’s never easy to realize that, despite good intentions, one’s efforts to be helpful may cause more harm. That is, in part, the reckoning the ISE field must address as we emerge from the global pandemic striving to do and be better. While there are instances and examples of educational work that exemplify our vision for equity, access, and inclusion, for the most part, ISE practice continues to operate within paradigms from the larger systems of society that perpetuate inequalities. We argue work towards the just and egalitarian goals in ISE organization’s equity and access statements fall short without the organization’s staff (the humans who do the work) engaging in critical consciousness together. Building on a model from youth development scholars, we advocate for the need to include humility, compassion, and belonging in critical consciousness. Without these components, unconscious biases shade people’s abilities to see the strengths in those different from them, to offer care to everyone (especially people who have been pushed into the margins), and to work towards ensuring everyone is rightfully welcomed, just as they are. Importantly, we must embody these ideas with our staff and in our work culture before we can genuinely practice them for our audiences. Doing so requires a mindset towards professional learning and reflective practice, and then intentionally designing and refining structures to support learning from individual staff into the collective organization.
... Da mesma forma, reconhece-se que a formação inicial dos mediadores nos espaços (quando os têm) não tem esse foco principal, dado que o aumento desses conhecimentos é bastante gradual e não ocorre de imediato no início do seu desenvolvimento profissional (Richard, 2010). De qualquer forma, estratégias sistemáticas de reflexão sobre o contexto e suas mudanças ao longo do tempo também seriam relevantes para promover esse tipo de conhecimento (Tran, 2019). ...
A contribuição dos espaços de educação científica não formal para a melhoria do interesse e compreensão das ciências por parte dos visitantes depende, sobretudo, da mediação entre a exposição e o público realizada por mediadores[1]. A mediação de visitas guiadas é uma tarefa complexa que exige a mobilização de diferentes tipos de conhecimentos dos mediadores, que moldam as suas práticas educativas e, consequentemente, a experiência dos visitantes. Por isso, este trabalho buscou caracterizar as percepções dos mediadores de museus e centros de ciências, aquários, jardins botânicos e zoológicos brasileiros sobre seus conhecimentos. Para atingir esse objetivo, um questionário de percepção de conhecimentos foi aplicado com 78 mediadores de diferentes espaços educativos brasileiros. Isso nos permitiu caracterizar suas percepções do conhecimento do conteúdo, do contexto, dos visitantes e sua aprendizagem, e das estratégias de facilitação, reconhecendo diferenças nessas percepções de acordo com os anos de experiência do mediador. Da mesma forma, permitiu reconhecer três etapas de desenvolvimento profissional dos mediadores (inserção, estabilização e diversificação), discutir as diferentes necessidades formativas em cada uma delas e o seu potencial impacto nas práticas educativas dos mediadores. [1] Existe uma vasta gama de termos que se referem à mediação humana na educação não formal e não existe uma abordagem única sobre o que significa o seu papel (Daza-Caicedo et al., 2020; Specht & Loreit, 2021) Neste trabalho, se referirá a mediadores e educadores como aqueles profissionais voluntários ou contratados pelo espaço que realizam as visitas guiadas dos grupos
Zoos are important informal learning environments. We conducted an external reflective professional development program for a zoo’s informal science educators to understand the process and implications of this program. Six educators engaged in an 8-stage program that included self-observation of videos and discussions with colleagues. Educators' ability to change their educational processes was based on their ability to identify a gap between their declared goals and actual practices, or a gap between their explicit and implicit beliefs. The most impactful aspects of this professional development program were video observations, discussion with colleagues, and the researcher's guidance and scaffolding during video observations with educators.
It is through the collective work of museum educators that an organization grows its social capital in its local community and beyond its physical footprint. Given the significant contributions of museum educators to an institution’s outcomes, we argue for a shift in mindset on investing in their growth and development. We share our reasoning for this change through our experiences from the Reflecting on Practice program. Two leaders in our community offer their reflections on why they took this leap of faith and the outcomes 5–10 years since their first step.
The construct professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking is introduced as a way to begin to unpack the in-the-moment decision making that is foundational to the complex view of teaching endorsed in national reform documents. We define this expertise as a set of interrelated skills including (a) attending to children's strategies, (b) interpreting children's understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond on the basis of children's understandings. This construct was assessed in a cross-sectional study of 131 prospective and practicing teachers, differing in the amount of experience they had with children's mathematical thinking. The findings help to characterize what this expertise entails; provide snapshots of those with varied levels of expertise; and document that, given time, this expertise can be learned.
Botanic gardens are popular destinations for school visits to learn about plant-based science. However, little is known about teaching and learning in such settings, in particular about school visits guided by professional botanic garden educators (BGEs). The purpose of this study was to identify the pedagogical moves of the BGEs during guided school visits. More specifically, this study follows a qualitative research design, investigating six elementary school groups (7- to 11-years old) guided by three BGEs. The guided visits were videotaped and the transcripts analyzed in order to find out the patterns of the BGE and student discourse. The findings from this study indicate that although BGE-student dialogic interactions occasionally occurred, a non-interactive/authoritative communicative approach was the more common practice of the BGEs when communicating science to students. However, the components of storytelling and the use of analogies identified have a great potential for enriching the explanatory talk of the BGEs. The results of this study suggest that the dynamics of discourse during guided school visits were shaped by both the BGEs and students through the shift of power during this discourse. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach
Educators in informal settings can be a key part of the learning experience, yet they are often poorly supported as professionals. This study followed the professional development of museum educators who participated in iterative implementation of a new school trip program focused on climate change. The learner-centered pedagogy, inquiry format, and controversial content of this program all presented challenges to the educators’ existing models of learning and teaching in the museum. We offer four case studies that explore how part-time museum docents engaged in reflective practice through iterative implementation and how their approaches to learning and teaching in the museum changed, or failed to change. Findings have implications for addressing the challenge of effective professional development for informal educators, particularly in content areas that may be scientifically challenging or socially controversial.
This study investigated the following question: To what extent and in what ways might using video help interns reflect on their discussion-based teaching in a more complex manner than when they use memory-based written reflection? Three elementary interns participated in the study. Findings suggest that video-supported reflection enabled interns to write more specific (vs. general) comments about their teaching than writing from memory, shift the content of the reflections from a focus on classroom management in memory-based reflections to a focus on instruction when video was available, and focus less on themselves and more on children when they reflected on video clips of their teaching. The power of video-based reflection to help interns revisit, notice, and investigate how they facilitate classroom discussions is considered.
This study investigates whether four types of achievement goals-mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance-influence effort and intrinsic interest at work. Cross-lagged panel analyses were applied to data from a two-wave survey conducted on 57 newly hired Japanese police officers. The results showed that performance-approach goals had significant positive influences on effort and intrinsic interest. In contrast, performance-avoidance goals had significant negative impacts on the abovementioned two outcome variables. Longitudinal effects were observed when the influence of competence expectancy was controlled. These results highlight the benefits of performance-approach goals and the costs associated with performance-avoidance goals in the workplace.
Conventions of transcription Introduction Part I. Establishing the Theoretical Framework: 1. The complementary contributions of Halliday and Vygotsky to a 'language-based theory of learning' 2. In search of knowledge 3. Discourse and knowing in the classroom Part II. Discourse, Learning, and Teaching: 4. Text, talk, and inquiry: schooling as semiotic apprenticeship 5. Putting a tool to different uses: a reevalution of the IRF sequence 6. From guessing to predicting: progressive discourse in the learning and teaching of science 7. Using the tool-kit of discourse in the activity of learning and teaching 8. Making meaning with text: a genetic approach to the mediating role of writing Part III. Learning and Teaching in the ZPD: 9. On learning with and from our students 10. The zone of proximal development and its implications for learning and teaching Appendices References Indexes.
Thinking, particularly reflective thinking or inquiry, is essential to both teachers' and students' learning. In the past 10 to 15 years numerous commissions, boards, and foundations as well as states and local school districts have identified reflection/ inquiry as a standard toward which till teachers and students must strive. However. although the cry for accomplishment in systematic, reflective thinking is clear, it is more difficult to distinguish what systematic, reflective thinking is, There are four problems associated with this Inch of definition that make achievement Of such a standard difficult. First, it is unclear how systematic reflection is different from other types of thought. Second, it is difficult to assess a skill that is vaguelyT defined. Third, without a clear picture of what reflection looks like, it has lost its abilitly to be seen and therefore has begun to lose it value. And finally, withont a clear definition, it is difficult to research the effects of reflective teacher education and professional development on teachers, practice and students' learning. It is the purpose of this article to restore some clarity to the concept of reflection and what it means to think, by going back to the roots of reflection in the work of John Dewey. I look at four distinct criteria that characterize Dewey view and offer the criteria as a starting place for talking about reflection, so that it might be taught, learned, assessed, discussed, and researched, and thereby evolve in definition and practice, rather than disappear.
Reflective practice has an allure that is seductive in nature because it rings true for most people as something useful and informing. However, for reflection to genuinely be a lens into the world of practice, it is important that the nature of reflection be identified in such a way as to offer ways of questioning taken-for-granted assumptions and encouraging one to see his or her practice through others’eyes. The relationship between time, experience, and expectations of learning through reflection is an important element of reflection, and to teach about reflection requires contextual anchors to make learning episodes meaningful. This article examines the nature of reflection and suggests how it might become effective reflective practice that can be developed and enhanced through teacher preparation programs.
This paper reports the findings from an interview study with 24 educators from 10 museums in England. The investigation looked at how educators characterise their work and how their work is organised. The analytical framework of this investigation draws on sociological discussions on professionalism. The findings show that there is shared conception of what museum educators do and that a technical language to talk about their work is emerging. However, further development may be effected by the diversity in educators’ educational backgrounds. Furthermore, the way work is divided in some (large) institutions directly challenges the integrity and expert knowledge of the practitioners, which may ultimately impede the occupation from truly becoming a profession. The findings have implications for researchers and practitioners interested in science teaching in museum environments, and to the professionalisation of museum education.
Teachers' written reflections on their work, which report on a change in their practice, were the object of this research. Taking teachers' articulation of their plans and actions in teacher journals as our source, this study's aim is twofold: (1) to describe how teacher reflect in a self‐initiated and non‐framed way on their own practice, and (2) to review teacher self generated reflections in reference to models of reflection. In this way, we tried to disclose what precisely teachers write (said) when reflecting on their work (did) in order to appreciate their way of describing what matters in their work; and position this in reference to models that conceptualise (“talk”) on how to actualise (‘walk’) reflection. This ‘double’ articulation of reflection is gauged in two ways, i.e., on: a) completeness, that is, whether it includes relevant components of reflection (models) to be found in the literature, and on b) recursiveness, that is, whether the written account gives evidence of an integrated cyclical, i.e., recursive process of re‐view, which appraises and looks back on what has been accomplished.
The results show that teachers do not work along the lines identified in current reflection models (i.e. providing clear problem definition, searching for evidence, planning for change, and reviewing plans). Instead, many teachers use a narrative and valuing appraisal of their accomplishments; not so much cautiously reviewing their actions but prospectively commenting on plans and solutions for future action. The data lead us to be cautious about the prominence of reflection models as advocated in the literature to be applied to teachers' written accounts of their practice.
This paper examines one model of professional development, the use of video clubs in which groups of teachers watch and discuss videotapes of their classrooms. Specifically, the paper investigates the learning that occurred as four middle-school mathematics teachers participated in a year-long series of video club meetings. Over time, discourse in the video clubs shifted from a primary focus on the teacher to increased attention to students’ actions and ideas. In addition, discussions of student thinking moved from simple restatements of students’ ideas to detailed analyses of student thinking. Furthermore, teachers began to reframe their discussions of pedagogical issues in terms of student thinking.
The main goal of this chapter is to describe how research findings on a scaffoldingfocused,reflection-oriented community of practice transformed museum educators'identities as educators. A second goal is to describe the theory, the multiple methodologies drawing on that theory,and the layered analysis that accompanied this research. Our theoretical lens is sociocultural,placing great emphasis on community building,dialogic negotiation,and ongoing reflection and research on practice.
If the purpose of reflection is to improve teaching, it is essential to understand how video-aided reflection influences teacher change. Yet, there is limited research addressing how video analysis influences the change process. The purpose of this study was to gain an in depth understanding of how video influences the process of teacher change. Teachers in three different teaching environments engaged in semester-long video-reflection groups. Through a descriptive analysis of these meetings, participants’ own video-analyses, and individual interviews, six over-arching themes emerged across the different environments that describe the change process. Teachers reported that video encouraged change because it helped them: (a) focus their analysis, (b) see their teaching from a new perspective, (c) trust the feedback they received, (d) feel accountable to change their practice, (e) remember to implement changes, and (f) see their progress. We discuss how these results may help researchers and educators understand how video can be used to encourage teacher improvement.
Reflection is currently a key concept in teacher education. The reflection process is often described in terms of a cyclical model. In the present article, we explain how such a model can be used for supporting student teachers’ reflection on practical situations they are confronted with, and on their behaviour, skills and beliefs in such situations. In some cases, however, more fundamental issues appear to influence teachers’ practical functioning. For example, their self‐concept can have a decisive influence on the way they function, or they may do what is expected of them, and yet not feel truly involved. In such cases, a more fundamental form of reflection is needed, which in this article we refer to as ‘core reflection’. The focus on core reflection concurs with the recent emphasis in psychology on attending to people’s strengths rather than their deficiencies.
Background/Context
This study builds upon research on teacher professional communities and high school restructuring reforms. It employs a conceptual framework that draws upon theories of “community of practice” and “community of learners.”
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
This study analyzes how teachers’ professional inquiry communities at the high school level constitute a resource for school reform and instructional improvement.
Setting
This research focused on a reforming, comprehensive urban public high school with site-based management.
Population/Participants/Subjects
This study investigates the practices of six school-based oral inquiry groups known as Critical Friends Groups (CFGs), which were selected as cases of mature professional communities. Twenty-five teachers and administrators participated as informants.
Research Design
This research involved a video-based, qualitative case study.
Data Collection and Analysis
Data included observations of CFG meetings, interviews with teachers and administrators, and document collection. Analysis entailed coding with qualitative software, development of analytic cross-CFG meta-matrices, discourse analytic techniques, and joint viewing of video records with informants.
Findings/Results
The author explores four particular design features of CFGs—their diverse menu of activities, their decentralized structure, their interdisciplinary membership, and their reliance on structured conversation tools called “protocols”—showing how these features carry within them endemic tensions that compel these professional communities to negotiate a complicated set of professional development choices.
Conclusions/Recommendations
The findings demonstrate how the enactment of design choices holds particular consequences for the nature and quality of teacher learning and school improvement. Although CFGs enhanced teachers’ collegial relationships, their awareness of research-based practices and reforms, their schoolwide knowledge, and their capacity to undertake instructional improvement, these professional communities offered an inevitably partial combination of supports for teacher professional development. In particular, CFGs exerted minimal influence on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. CFGs would benefit from regular and systematic metacognitive and process-oriented reflections to identify how their collaborative practices might optimally advance their “bottom line” goal of improving teacher practice to increase student achievement. Additionally, high schools might pursue multiple and complementary CFG-like professional development opportunities in subject matter departments and interdisciplinary grade-level academy teams. Mid-afternoon sunlight pours into Principal Alec Gordon's living room on this early release day. ¹ Lounging on chairs and the carpeted floor, 11 members of Revere High School's staff—among them teachers, the principal, an instructional aide, and a counselor—are in the midst of a structured conversation about a collection of student pinhole photographs brought by Lars, an art teacher. As the group talks, some members hold and peruse the black and white matted images. One member muses aloud, “Not that Lars can answer this now, but I wonder what was the purpose of this assignment? Will doing pinhole photographs make students better photographers or is this just a fun exercise?” As required by the protocol structure, Lars sits silently listening to his colleagues’ attempt to make sense of his students’ products, as well as the instructional context that generated them. Prompted by a timekeeper, the facilitator eventually shifts the conversation. “Oh, it's time? It's time. OK, next in this protocol, we reflect on the process as a group. Share what you learned about the student, about your colleagues, about yourself. Use questions from the previous page.” As the group concludes this conversation, their 3-hour monthly meeting comes to a close. They carry cups and plates to the kitchen and gather up the papers that have accumulated in their laps and on the coffee table. Several photocopies of student essays on violence prevention, as well as copies of a Michelle Fine article, get stowed away into briefcases and knapsacks. Lars collects his students’ work, putting pinhole cameras in a bag and rolling up a poster-sized enlargement of a playground shot. Some members assemble on the deck over the water chatting; their laughter floats into the living room. Others congregate by the fireplace to share lingering ideas with Shelby, the health teacher who brought the violence prevention essays. In the dining room, a veteran math teacher approaches a first-year chemistry teacher and asks how his year is going. Meanwhile, some members scurry off, thanking their host and bidding farewell to the group.
Many researchers and teacher educators propose that reflection is an important way teachers can think about changing their views and practices. The hierarchical constructs used to describe reflection, however, are often interpreted in ways that promote reflection as a toolteachers use to elevate their views and practices toward ideal “end goals” rather than as a more complex intellectual act that could help them learn how to shape their own goals. This research explores how four early career science teachers learned to negotiate the conflicts between their own goals and actual practices by situating their reflections in multiple contexts. They were invited to become aware of those conflicts through interviews and discussions of classroom observations and then to address them by actually teaching toward their own unrealized goals. The data generated from these activities were described with a rubric based on M. van Manen's reflection construct (1977) but were framed with certain perceptions each teacher had about her or his own science teaching. Several patterns emerged across the four teachers' cases that challenge the use of reflection as a tool and suggest how science teachers can reflect as a way to take greater ownership over and responsibility for their own lifelong learning. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed91:629–663, 2007
This chapter provides a theory of informal and incidental learning and updates this theory based on recent research.
This article describes a 3-year study of school visits to four natural history museums and addresses the research agenda with regard to out-of-school learning. More specifically, the findings focus on the process of learning in museums. Comprehensive data collection allowed for an analysis of patterns of guided visits, the way the scientific content was conveyed to students, and the extent and types of social interactions thus enabled. Observations of 42 guided visits (grades 3–11) indicates that the main visitation pattern consisted of guide-centered and task-oriented activity. Analysis of questions asked by museum guides reveals that most of these questions required mainly lower-order thinking skills. A common questioning pattern was to ask rhetorical questions as a means of carrying on the lecture. Detailed analysis of the scientific vocabulary used by the guides indicates that they used much scientific jargon, with limited explanation. There was only limited social mediation provided by teachers and museum guides. A minority of teachers were involved in the activities or in helping the guide to clarify or in helping the students to understand the explanations. The overall data indicate limited opportunities for meaningful learning, suggesting that the museums should shift from the traditional knowledge-transmission model of teaching to a more socioculturally contextualized model. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 44: 747–769, 2007
A study of docent-led guided school tours at a museum of natural history was investigated. Researchers engaged in naturalistic inquiry to describe how natural history content was conveyed to students and what students gained from this model of touring. They also investigated how the content and pedagogy within the guided tour complemented recommendations from formal science standards documents and informal learning literature. About 30 visiting school groups in Grades 2–8 were observed. Teachers (n = 30) and select students (n = 85) were interviewed. Researchers found that tours were organized in a didactic way that conflicted with science education reform documents and research related to learning within informal contexts. Students' responses to interview questions indicated high satisfaction with the tours but low levels of science learning. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 200–218, 2003
From the holistic perspective taken in this research, the descriptions of APL throughout this chapter are imbued with nuances
of the professional life-world, but because the focus is on the experience of learning, some life-world details are lightly
sketched. To contextualise the phenomenological structure of APL, this chapter begins with a description of the professional
life-world drawn from the complete data corpus, with respect to three aspects of the professional context: professional affiliations,
employer organisations and local workplaces.
Effective teachers consider interrelationships among aspects of teaching including learners, subject matter knowledge, assessment, and instruction. The 70 journal entries of 25 preservice elementary teachers are analyzed to characterize the teachers’ written reflection. One focus of the analysis is on how the preservice teachers integrate ideas about these aspects of teaching. The preservice teachers sometimes integrate ideas about learners with ideas about instruction. Further analyses illustrate the difference between integrating ideas and simply juxtaposing them. The paper illuminates how reflecting on multiple aspects of teaching may help new teachers integrate their knowledge and begin to develop a more complex view of teaching.
Teacher reflection on action has been studied extensively in the last 25 years. To appreciate the concept and its use, we should look at the key features of reflection on action (TRA) as identified in research and what teachers state is typical of reflection. In three other studies we have explored possible alignments among (1) what has been claimed (using 50 conceptual papers); (2) what has been disseminated to teachers (using 122 articles on teacher development); and (3) what has been described by teachers (analyzing 49 teacher accounts of reflection practices). As a result of this exploration, we found little empirical evidence for what has been stated in theoretical essays. The research‐based papers revealed that the studies conducted were not very relevant for key characteristics of TRA as identified by the theoretical papers. Furthermore, in attempting to gauge teachers’ reflections, the research does not really reflect what is advocated by models of reflection. These findings led us to conclude that the concept of teacher reflection on action is still very much in flux and may not be adopted as intended in programs of teacher professional development and teacher education.
Supporting natural history enquiry in an informal setting: A study of museum Explainer practice
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The purposes, practices, and professionalism of teacher reflectivity: Insights for twenty-first-century teachers and students
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Larrivee, B. (2010). What we know and don't know about teacher reflection. In E. G. Pultorak
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Awareness grows of importance of learning science beyond school. Education Week
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