Thing 5: Reflective practice

I'm always aware that I need to reflect more in my job but using a blog to do this seemed too time consuming - having to set it up/update it and too public!

In my post I constantly tell students that they need to self-evaluate - reflect on what they've done and what they could have done to improve it and what they are going to do next time -  but I don't do it myself!

In September I started a Masters. My first assignment was a reflective essay on the work I had done at my previous school on the Extended Project Qualification with recommendations for what could be done at my current school. Writing that piece made me stop and think about the work I had done over the previous 5 years with students from KS3 to KS5. I realised that I had been constantly tweaking sessions expanding and reducing them to fit the available time and abilities of the students but I hadn't recorded it anywhere. I had looked at exam criteria for the EPQ, resources available, produced a toolkit to support students learning and record keeping so that they could reflect on what they had learnt - but I hadn't done any of this myself. The only physical evidence I had was the versions of the toolkit (now on version 5), two reports analysing two questionnaires that students had done and memories of discussions that I had had with the Director of Learning who was responsible for the EPQ. How much easier my life, and essay, would have been if I had taken time to record my thoughts on the toolkit, the successes and failures of the teaching tasks that I had done and to record student observations.

After half-term I start teaching year 12s for the first time in my new school, this is new for my school who have never had a Librarian that has done this before and will be a new experience for me in this school.

I have gone back to my toolkit to tweak it for the students who are going to be doing a 5 week research project. I have looked at the PowerPoint I have created and some of the tasks that I have used in the past to try teach students how to use e-resources and catalogues, how to reference and to try and teach them about plagiarism - always an exciting topic!

I have decided that I am going to use this blog to evaluate those sessions and see what worked well, what didn't and how I am going to improve those sessions. So watch this space.....