[MUSIC] But it is almost as if that kind of reflection also requires the teacher to challenge some of their own assumptions. >> Yes, yes it does I think. You know, Brookfield has argued in the past that an important part of reflective practice is challenging our assumption. Of course this is very difficult thing to do, because we don't know what our assumptions are that's why they're assumptions. [LAUGH] We, but our assumptions you know, they're the way in which we, you know, we interpret things that happen to us the way which we understand things. And there's an extent to which we, you know, we need assumptions in order to, to live you know, to live our lives, there is, there is a nice phrase meaning schemes, from, from the literature on adult education. The idea that during our lifetime we develop certain meaning schemes, ways of understanding the world, experiencing the world. And, and new experiences, new information. Instead of changing the way we look at the world, we somehow manipulate this new experience especially that which might challenge it. We, we manage to manipulate it in such a way that we can fit it into our existing meaning schemes. You know, I think we all understand how, how we do this. and, and, you know, these are our assumptions. So to challenge them is very difficult. And one of the things of our reflective practice is of course, is that its very difficult to challenge your assumptions on your own I think [LAUGH] and for me, one of the important aspects of, of reflectional practice if its to be you know, very useful to a particularly you know, maximally useful we might say,. Is that it's not always something that we do on our own you know, it's something we might do in discussion with other people whether they are, you know, other, other teachers, other students, friends of ours. They might be our tutors at university or mentors in school or whatever but. It does seem very, you know, it clearly is very important, because there is no becoming. You know, if, if we don't challenge our assumptions, we would always just stay, pretty much stay, stay the way that we are. And I think it's particularly, you know, we, we go, we go back to this issue about our own school days for example. A lot of our assumptions about teaching and learning, of course will have their roots and our own experiences of school. We'll have spent many, many years in school becoming used to certain ways of doing things. And we'll have, we'll have obviously have made decisions about what we thing is good and what we think isn't good. And so on and so forth. Add inevitably we're going to bring lots of assumptions about teaching and learning into, the classroom. And you know, with beginning teachers for example, we might we might encourage beginning teachers to explore certain theories of learning. And we know that many of them will say, oh, yeah that's good. But many of them will resist certain theories, because it doesn't quite fit. Or they will, they will pay lip service to it, but they won't really challenge what, what they do. So challenging assumptions is, is, is a challenge, but it's an important one. And it, and, for me, it is an important part of what we mean by reflection in practice. It is to do with change in, in our understandings, it's to do with being inflexible with, with, with wanting to move on, with wanting to become, all the time, to, you know, this idea of endless becoming. >> So, talking about reflective practice,. >> Mm-hm. >> in your book, you actually developed that idea into this notion of reflexive teaching, can you outline for us what, what, what that is. Yes, and I, I mean, reflexivity is, is a tricky, tricky one. It's it's a kind of development of reflection on practice, or a particular way of reflecting on our practice, which doesn't replace the, the way we normally think of in terms of reflection on practice. You know and there are many ways we can do this. But it tries to develop this idea that we were talking about, I think of assumption hunting, in, in a sense and, and challenging our assumptions. And perhaps it's easiest to talk about two strands to reflexive practice, we, or reflexivity, I should say. One is to, to think about the, the sort of idiosyncratic contingent nature, of, of, of, of teaching. The mech, the messy complexity that we mentioned of the classroom but also you know, of society so reflexivity encourages us to understand our practice not in isolation from, you know? The, the wider society in which we live. Or the wider world in which we live. But to factor those considerations in so we don't pretend, for example, that, that, you know? That our, our students socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds have no impact on, on how they experience schooling. Or how they are in our classrooms, how they respond we do. We pay attention to that, we think about it. And again, it's part of this idea of not just thinking about, you know, ourselves in isolation, you know, about our personal qualities or our. Our competences or whatever. It's factoring in an acknowledgement and a developing understanding of the impact of students lives outside school, on, on, on they way they are and the way they learn inside school. And it would include for example, understanding the impact of e, e, emotionality on, on students. Understanding behavior, for example. In terms of, more in terms of what happens outside school. And, and in doing that, perhaps developing some more appropriate ways of dealing with you know? Not just dismissing someone's behavior as bad, or unacceptable, or, you know? It's against the rules. I mean, we may, we may, we may feel we need to punish bad behavior, in some way. But it's trying to understand it in terms of, of the student's wider life. So it's taking, it kind of takes us outside the classroom, in that sense. But it also takes us outside in, in another sense. In that, it encourages us to try and explore. And our own feelings and our own responses. So it, it, for example, you know, if we feel that something is upsetting, and if something has upset us in the past, we might begin to try and think about why it has. And that might involve exploring our own, our own history, our own personal history. Things that happen to us at school, in our families, and so on and so forth. So it's also about understanding our own emotionality and not pretending that it's not important. You know, as, as a teacher and educator I, and I'm embarrassed when I look back now. I always you to say to my my students on, on the PGC course. I churn out these platitudes, one of which was you have to leave your emotional baggage outside the classroom. And I look back and I go this was a nonsense thing to say really you know, we, we cannot just treat our emotions as things we can just dump somewhere conveniently. You know, we carry them with us. And they responses to things, and we can't, so what we need to do is to understand them and how to management and to understand how they're affecting our practice, how they're affecting how we're analyzing things how we're reflecting on things in the classroom. So there are these two strands one, as I said, you know, taking account of the, of the, the, the, the wider contexts within which education's taking place, in relation to individual students, or to whole classes. And the other, trying to understand our, ourselves a bit better. And, you know, why, why we're feeling the way we're feeling about certain things. That, that why is it that something upsets me and yet, you know, my friend who teaches in the, in the same class and they do the same things. It's just water off the duck's back. It is difficult because it can, as with all these other discourses, become, very unhelpful, like, you know, so it can be very helpful, but it can become unhelpful. I think it become unhelpful because it can again focus too much attention, too much attention, too much responsibility on the individual person. So there's a danger that understanding oneself can, can very easily turn into, you know, blaming oneself or holding oneself exclusively responsible, but I think if it's, if it's done properly and again, with the help of others, reflexivity can be the best most productive kind of reflectional practice. It doesn't just stop with you know, looking at this lesson or this series of lessons. It includes in reflection, a whole lot of other things which we often are encouraged to to leave out. And, and a particular thing we're encouraged to leave out is, our feelings. Teachers are not suppose to have feelings.
