The changing face of the academic world, the major cuts in funding, the new pressures faced by academics are also reflected in the changing role of the postdoc. While in the past newly qualified doctoral students or those in the writing up stage would spend a great deal of time writing up grant applications for
Read on »Archives: 2013
A common student query…What should I reflect on?
This is probably the most common question my students ask… Reflective analyses form an part of their course work and they may be quite disillusioned with ‘reflecting’ when all they want to, from their perspective, is to ‘do’/ ‘to create’/ ‘to make’. They may just resist reflection and this can be a difficult concept for
Read on »Critical Reflection and Teaching
Some of my reading for this week included extracts from Stephen D. Brookfield (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass) One passage quite early on in the book drew my attention: ‘What critical reflection means for our teaching’ (38-48) Here Brookfield discusses the ‘emotive’ aspect not just of teaching, but also of being reflective
Read on »On reflection (my third teaching principle)
Further to a previous post (http://wp.me/p2kETw-59) over the past few weeks I have been thinking more deeply about the concept of reflection. Reading through current literature on the subject, I realised that there was a network of words that kept cropping up. Often these are isolated and discussed as free-standing concepts, sometimes they are not.
Read on »Three rules of teaching – a personal perspective
With me, teaching is personal. It’s a process that enriches my practice(s), enlivens my thinking and pushes me toward excellence. Yes, there’s a lot of theoretical writing out there about teaching theories, practices and the nature of the educational experience; over the next few posts however, I want to reflect on the underlying principles of
Read on »Thoughts on John Connell’s ‘I am Learner’
I’ve been reading various texts on learning and creativity over the past few weeks and have of course needed to think about the kind of learner that I am. I have never really thought about what kind of learner I am, but through this research I have begun to see my own learning processes in
Read on »Overture & Disclaimer
Writing is an integral part of my practice, whether that is my teaching, practice based research or any other kind of research or performance. This blog provides a repository for some of my thinking on teaching, research as well as academic leadership and management. I do not have a particular audience in mind but some of
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