It is sadly not often enough that we get to stop and think about what, as educators and practitioners, we do on a daily basis – it is so easy to get caught up in the daily operations and delivery, but the Reflective Conservatoire Conference held at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama earlier
Read on »Reflection
Reflection as creative process
An issue that has always intrigued me is that of ‘creativity’. One of my favourite sources on this topic is Ken Robinson, in particular his book “Out of our minds: Learning to be Creative”. Over the next couple of posts I will be exploring this topic a little further, side-by-side with my current work on
Read on »Innovative Conservatoire Seminar 10: Student as Teacher, Dartington 2014
The innovative conservatoire seminar is always such an inspiring space to inhabit. Over three days key members from various European institutions gather at Dartington Hall to share practice and ideas creating a vibrant and supportive community of practice. In this positive place, fear is cast aside and experimentation is encouraged. I find that this kind of
Read on »Writing…getting started (WAA)
One of the courses I will be teaching next academic year is entirely focussed on writing within the arts. As part of my preparation for this course, I’ve decided to collect my ideas and experiences on both writing and reading. As a result the following posts are really written with my students in mind (hence
Read on »Thoughts on the reflective practitioner
In the article “Focus: Becoming a reflective practitioner”, http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/subjects/medev/Focus-_Becoming_a_reflective_practitioner the Higher Education Academy interrogates the concepts of reflection and reflective practice identifying them as “two of the key buzzwords in professional and education practice at present”. They provide their definition of reflection, in the process breaking down what they see as the “key stages in reflective
Read on »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.
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