Being Reflective

Being reflective.. What does that mean?

For my university course, the aim of each section is to be reflective on your studies. Being a teacher requires the skill of being reflective upon everything you learn in sessions and any readings. It is an intense course and requires a lot of outside work on essential reads, being reflective (there's that word again) and creating journals. At the moment, I am doing the core subjects (Maths, English, Science, TTL and PPD) and my minor specialism (Music) as sessions, however I will be gaining more sessions after Christmas such as the foundation subjects (Geography, PSHCE, P.E, History, Music, Art, D&T, R.E and other I might have forgotten) and each of these require documentation of reflections of my studies. For example, in English and Music I am required to keep a personal journal where I can be as creative as I want (hopefully I will post some pictures of my progression in completing this) or a literal as I'd like. I'm not all that creative but as my chosen career is primary teaching, I'm expanding my creative side and attempting to make them as creative as possible, lets just hope they turn out okay.

So the idea of being reflective.. Still, to me, this idea is difficult to comprehend and I'm struggling to grasp the concept of it. However, I am trying my hardest and will make these journals as good as I can to gain the best marks I can.

I've found the following quotes from here which explains some aspects of reflective teaching which is what I'm aiming to be: a reflective teacher...

"Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking about why you do it, and thinking about if it works - a process of self-observation and self-evaluation." 

"This may then lead to changes and improvements in our teaching."

This has been a thinking post to any trainee teachers out there being asked to be reflective in their studies and teaching. I know this will not be useful to most of your reading this but the idea of being reflective has been confounding me since I began university so I thought I'd share it on my blog which is all about my life.

Hope your well

J