Pulling It All Together
Reflective practice is valuable in confirming what you are doing well. That validation can affirm the results of your efforts, your skills, and your intentions. Although positive feedback feels great and will motivate you to keep moving forward, reflective practice can also help you to identify areas for change or improvement. Receiving feedback that requires you to make a change can sometimes be difficult to hear or absorb. It can also be challenging to make sense of where you should go next. You’re already working so hard, what more can you do?
Behaviour change is most effective when clear and measurable goals have been identified. Professional development activities such as workshops, conferences, and trainings can play a vital role in enhancing your teaching practice. Yet, despite good intentions to implement new knowledge and skills post-training, translating lessons learned into day-to-day practice is not always easy or feasible. To make sustainable changes to your teaching practice through reflective practice, you might need to take a ‘non-traditional’ approach.
Changing your teaching practice is a process, not an event. Meaningful change requires persistent attention to how you engage with your work, colleagues, and students. Although it is not always intentional, each interaction and every teaching moment conveys to others who you are and what you stand for as a faculty member.
The rich data that you have collected through the activities in Part Two and Part Three of this manual and your reflections on this data will have revealed to you the inconsistencies or gaps about who you want to be, what you value, and how you come across to others. The areas of disconnect between your actions and your aspirational vision of yourself as a faculty member offer you a personalized roadmap for change.
Activity