Looking Back

 Introduction

  As I look back at this reflective blog and the last semester of learning in this course I will structure each part of this final entry into two four categories. These are:

1. I learned that.

2. I learned this when.

3. This learning matters.

4. In the light of this learning

Part 1

Reflective vs Reflexive Actions

  The reflective-reflexive habit is not new to me. Certified teachers are expected to be very familiar with the term and administrators frequently ask teachers to reflect on lessons, units and activities. I was drilled on the do's and dont's of reflective practice while  completing a post graduate diploma in education from the University of the West Indies, School of Education, St. Augustine. So its certainly useful for me to look back and ask: What did I learn?

At the start of the course I was not sure  about the term reflexive as opposed to reflective and I spent some time trying to clarify this. I watched the videos in the course but I could not get a full grasp of this. Then I read a paper by Stingu (2012) where the author cited Dewey (1933) and shared this direct quote:

‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further consequences to which it leads’ (p. 9).

  The same author follows this by citing Schon (1983) who distinguished between reflection on action and reflection in action. For simplicity I will say that reflexive practice is the same as reflection in action and reflective practice is reflection on action.

  My next question is: Why does this matter? Here I will focus particularly on the significance of reflexive practice in the context on a pre-service teacher with limited experience and share a hypothetical anectdote below:

  In a lesson about fruit dispersal to 8 year olds the teacher says this:

'Fruits like this tomato and and this cherry and this apple are brightly colored to attract birds and other animals'

  Later in the lesson she asks students for some reasons why birds are attracted to ripe mangoes. She is expecting someone to say because of its bright yellow appearance but one girl says:

'Miss its sweet and tasty but its not red'

  Next comes the acid test of the true ilk of the educator. She must introspect while in mid-lesson and rewind her thoughts and go back to her initial discussion on fruits. Now she realizes that all of her examples were red fruits and she takes the time to clarify. An unfortunate and very poor course of action would be to tell the student to think back to the earlier discussions without providing scaffolding. The student could be allowed to reflect in action by the teacher saying this: 'Is red the only bright and attractive colour you know?'

  This learning does not matter very much to me in my daily practice but when I do engage in reflexive activity or reflection in action I am reminded about this course and I know that the next time I mentor a pre-service teacher or deliver a course or workshop on teaching that this clear  understanding of reflexive practice would be another string to my bow.

  When I implement formative quizzes using tools like Kahoot I often pause mid quiz to clarify and scaffold as needed because the immediate feedback from each learner that follows each question creates the opportunity to reflect in action and to set students up to do their own reflection.

Part 2

A Reflective Model for the Science Teacher

  From the discussion forums and the group activity in this course a recurring theme was the reflective models and how they relate to teaching and learning in online environments.

In going about this course I reflected on the Kolb model and how it could be useful in my practice as a science teacher.

The Kolb Model

 

FIGURE 1 

 I felt that the Kolb model was very appropriate for use in teaching science and I found support for this from  Mathieson, L. (2016). 

  This diagram above was taken from Zull (2002, p.18) and is presented in the website Reflection4Learning (n.d) It makes a connection between specific areas of the brain and how each section relates to specific parts of Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model. While the concrete experience here is great for hands-on activities it can apply in online learning environments. For instance this video on in vitro fertilization (IVF) also known as the test tube baby is a concrete experience and to get students to reflect critically. 
The teacher could set up an online discussion forum asking students to relate their understanding or the video to this image on the cover of Time magazine from 1978.

                                                                FIGURE 2  
The discussion could be extended to ask students (who are 17+ years old) to hypothesize on how their peers who don't take Biology would interpret this cover image. To complete the Kolb cycle the students could be required to interview a peer and share the findings on a collaborative space. 

  Once this data is analyzed and discussed then it could lead to more questions. For example: Does art limit or promote scientific understanding and awareness?
The cycle can then be started again with yet another thought provoking image from the cover of Time magazine (1989).

                                                                 FIGURE 2

Conclusion  

In EDLM 6200 this semester, I learnt that Kolb's reflective model is of great relevance to science teaching and this matters because it can serve as a good framework for getting science students to engage in critical reflection. In light if this learning it would provide me with a great theoretical framework that is well documented in the literature to support workshops like this one entitled Using Apps to teach Real Science.

 References 

Endangered Earth. (1989, January 2). Time, 133(1).

Mathieson, L. (2016). Synergies in critical reflective practice and science: Science as  
        reflection  and   reflection as science. Retrieved from https://ro.uow.edu.au/jutlp/vol13
        /iss2/4/

Stîngu, M. M. (2012). Reflexive practice in teacher education: facts and trends. Procedia - 
        Social and Behavioral Sciences, 33, 617–621. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.01.195

The Test Tube Baby. (1978, July 31). Time, 112(5).

Why Reflect? - Reflection4Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/
       reflection4learning/why-reflect  

The e-Multiple Choice item as a Reflective Tool

Today we completed our group presentation for this course. My team's presentation is available here. I was prompted to reflect by an observation made by our course coordinator Dr. Marshall-Stuart. A discussion about how a multiple choice item could be used as a reflective tool ensued and I suggested that if a gamification tool like Kahoot or a well designed Moodle quiz is used that these can make for good reflective tools by students and teachers in action and on action. In this post I will develop this point more, provide clear examples and support my thesis with reference to the literature.

A skillfully constructed multiple choice item is akin to an onion. As students attempt to select the correct response they must be pushed to draw upon their mastery of two or more understandings. Then after peeling back these layers of the onion they must make connections between them to arrive at the correct answer.  When an assessment item like this is used it calls for thinking at the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy. I will demonstrate this with an example.

The question  below is taken from Cambridge International Examinations (CIE)

                                Figure 1 (CIE, IGCSE- Past Exam Question) 

To arrive at a successful response the student must use a knowledge of the pH scale AND relate it to safety. In addition to that the question sets a real world context.

Imagine that this question is nestled in the Moodle LMS as a quiz and a student attempting the quiz selects D. This is an incorrect response but instead of including a pop up box that says sorry try again, the discerning educator would include feedback as follows:

This is very alkaline and while it would neutralize the acid it might not be the best choice. remember oven cleaners are powerful and made to clean sticky left-over materials. 

 Quizzes in the Moodle LMS allow for second attempts so if this is allowed then the student can go on to select A which is the correct response. Figure 2 below provides some detail about how this tool functions and it is extracted from my work in the laboratory course.

                                                                         Figure 2

                    

At the end of the quiz the teacher will receive feedback on scores and this will be broken up to show the choices made by students. If the majority of students select B and then this demonstrates the need to go back to a lesson on the meaning of the pH scale.

  This example shows reflection in action by students with teacher scaffolding and then reflection on action by the teacher and its all made more powerful because of the digital tools. Nicol (2007) lends strong support to the use of 'E-assessment by design' and makes reference to an approach to learning based on the use of electronic voting systems (EVS) which in modern terminology refers to learning games like Kahoot. Here a poll of student responses is used as an opportunity for peer-peer interaction as facilitators allow students to convince their peers about the validity of a particular choice and if the questions are well constructed then deep reflection would follow.

Next Steps
In light of the current  shift to online learning tools like these are of even greater significance. I am currently making a 15 question multiple choice quiz on moodle to use next week with my students as an online assessment and as I construct the questions I am using my knowledge of common student misconceptions to create meaningful feedback. This is a very tedious process and it must be seen as a work in progress because there will be more room for reflection and corrective action on the part of the teacher once the results are analyzed.

                                                                REFERENCES

Cambridge International Examinations (2016) https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-
              and-qualifications/cambridge-igcse-chemistry-0620/past-papers/

David Nicol (2007) E‐assessment by design: using multiple‐choice tests to good effect, Journal of 
              Further and Higher Education, 31:1, 53-64, DOI: 10.1080/03098770601167922

Reflecting on my Professional Journey in the 21st Century

Introduction

       As the course enters module five I have been looking at the ideas offered for the application of current and emerging practices for cultivating student reflection. I noted the importance of wikis, blogs, e-portfolios and social media, As I went about this I drew on my professional experience over the past 3 decades but I was focused particularly on the period 2009-present.

       Over the last decade I have been fortunate to work in two well resourced international schools. I worked in a 1:1 mac laptop school from 2009-2016 and then from 2016-present I have been working at a 1:1 ipad school. During this time I completed a Professional Certificate in Online Teaching and I led many workshops on teaching with technology. Given this background I decided to approach the learning in this module by looking back at some of the activities and projects that I created and facilitated for my students and relating them to the module 5 objectives. I will structure this critical reflection on my practice by making reference to the well known model presented by Gibbs (1988). Figure 1 below shows the Gibbs reflective cycle using an image from the University of Edinburgh.

    

 

Figure 1 

Reflecting on Video Lessons, Flipped Classroom Blogging and Reflective e-Portfolios.

       I made my first online video lesson in 2010 and over the past 10 years I  have been reflecting on how to improve. In 2012, I started posting my videos on a YouTube channel and my initial focus was on sharing what I usually present in a short face to face lecture as a video. I asked students to watch this at home and then when they come to class they would be engaged in discussions on the topic or be allowed to ask questions. I soon realized that this was being labeled as the flipped classroom. I was very skeptical about whether this would be successful and I decided to engage in some simple data collection and to make some qualitative observations. Ultimately I complied a video presentation to share with my supervisor. Today I returned to YouTube to look at this and I could see my initial reflections shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

Action Research on the Flipped Classroom (Dubay, 2013)

I am now reflecting on how useful this was and several thoughts come to mind. I will list some of them below:

1.Was this a complete reflection? Did I go through all of the stages of the Gibbs model? Perhaps, but it is certainly not documented in Figure 2. Following this research I started making shorter videos and this action when implemented allowed me to complete the reflective cycle.

2. This vlog or video blog that I created to document my work allows me to look back 7 years after the fact and to reflect on whether I agree with earlier conclusions and it creates a flood of memories. I am thinking that this must be a powerful tool for learners and if students used this then it would be a meaningful way of demonstrating understanding, identifying misconceptions and facilitating ongoing reflection. The likely concern would be the time it takes to produce a media presentation.

3. While the time required to post a video might limit this  kind of project it can be included occasionally but I realize that reflection could be continuous and meaningful but it need not be very media rich. I am thinking about an observation I made recently. In September 2018, I worked through a challenging problem on this video lesson with students completing a 2 year program in chemistry. Now 16 months later when I gave them the very same question I observed that the students struggled just as much as they did the first time. This observation led me to reflect on ways to avoid this occurrence in the future and I am currently thinking about asking students to create a digital portfolio of all the work they do but I feel that they should add reflective notes to themselves to go with each post or artifact.  Getting teenagers to buy in to this when it would not be for a grade is also a challenge but that leads me on to another reflection about how we assess.  Finally I want to relate all of this to the Gibbs model and I can say that I have described a problem and analyzed it finally I must now move to an action plan.

A Social Media Experiment

     In 2015-16 I challenged a cohort of 53 advanced high school biology students to join in a great social media experiment. We were all based in Shanghai, China. The air quality was an issue that we all faced and the students and I came from many countries including the USA, Canada, South Korea, India, Singapore, Denmark, Romania, Ireland, Thailand, Malaysia and Trinidad & Tobago. It was a time when Facebook was at its most popular with teenagers and the iPhone was the phone to have for these privileged young people. Given this context I wanted to engage students in a unique kind of field study that would allow them to search for the correlation between lichens and air quality. Lichens are abundant in Trinidad but I was struck by their absence in Shanghai and China as a whole. The story of the Global Lichen Project (GLP) is told here by a student in a article for the schools quarterly publication. A photo of this included in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3
Featured Article from The Eagle Review (2016)

      As I implemented and managed the project we posted data to a Facebook page. We engaged past students and students from other schools. Students followed a protocol to study tree trunks. They used phones to capture images and the GPS app to get data on latitude and longitude. Data on local air quality was gathered from relevant websites. With each step I learnt and reflected in action. I received feedback from colleagues at my school and from others who reached out via social media and I started formulating plans for improvement. Now 4 years later I have reflected critically on the strengths and weaknesses of the project. These are too numerous to discuss here in detail but as far as using social media for engaging students the project was a success. Since 2016 many schools have become very strict about child safeguarding and there are strict policies that limit the use of Facebook in this way. I certainly do not agree with these policies because I am of the opinion that social media is a great tool and like a car or a knife it must be used responsibly.
      My reflection on action led me to conclude that there is great merit to using social media in 21st century learning and I have no reason to change the objectives I presented in this video in 2015. The use of social media in the GLP fostered collaboration in a very broad way and student data and conversations provided opportunities for me and other colleagues to identify and correct misconceptions. I did note some areas for improvement with regard to the scientific validity of the methodology. Since 2016 other social media platforms have become more popular with young people and when I launch a similar initiative in the future I will certainly keep this in mind because there is an attraction in novelty that appeals to all people and more so the youth. The possibility of having a cross subject collaboration with computer science to create a GLP app is also under consideration.

References

Gibbs' reflective cycle. (1988). Retrieved from https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit
        /reflecting-on-experience/gibbs-reflective-cycle 

Hung, V (2016). The Eagle Review-Spring 2016. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/
        shanghaiamericanschool/docs/eagle_review_spring_2016

Young People must Reflect on Social Distancing.

I have been listening to the news that suggests that young people are not taking heed of the calls for social distancing in the wake of efforts to control the spread of COVID 19.

I reflected on this and on my practice. I teach a course called the Theory of Knowledge to 17 year olds at high school and we discuss issues like this in class but with my students out of class I reflected on what I could do to engage them.  At the same time I was reflecting on the positive feedback I received from the course coordinator on my last lesson (my post just prior to this). I also took heed of the areas I needed to improve on. In response to this I created the lesson below to engage my students in this very relevant issue. I also paid attention to linking my lesson objectives explicitly to the questions and I ensured that the lesson could be used by students with hearing and visual impairment.

I spent much time reflecting on how I would get students engaged and on how I would get them thinking, analyzing and reflecting.

I also reflected on action and I am seeing the need to ask on or two questions during my 2 minute presentation to allow for students to reflect in action.

My full lesson is available on Ted Ed. Please feel free to flip it to suit your needs or to use as is.
See link below:
https://ed.ted.com/on/3CXzQfp1
The graphics were from Piktochart and here is a link to my piktochart

Lesson Plan: Reflective-Reflective Practices in a Blended or Online High School Chemistry Class

Here I present a transcript of a lesson that was designed to promote reflection in action and on action by students in a grade 11 Chemistry course. Links to the video are included below.

TRANSCRIPT OF LESSON PRESENTATION

          Hello and welcome,

   In this video I’m going to explain to you how I design a lesson to promote reflection by my students in action and on action. As I outline this lesson I am reflecting on how I would typically begin and often I would find myself asking students about exothermic and endothermic reactions, how to convert litres to kilograms and what specific heat capacity-C to use. Very often when I ask these questions it might be directed at one particular student or students or it might just be me saying remember when we did this and remember when we did that. Often these statements and questions are met with perplexed and confused looks. Without thinking too much about it the teacher goes into the lesson for the day. 

    What I propose to do in this presentation is to create tools for my students to reflect and to find out whether they’ve understood some of the concepts needed to be successful in this lesson. I’m going to create more tools to allow them to reflect in action. Typically when such a lesson is completed the teacher might give a few questions again, a quiz and students typically may not score a hundred percent. What happens next to those three of four questions out of ten or twenty that the students missed? Obviously they represent certain gaps in knowledge. So what happens next? Should the teacher move to the next topic and begin the cycle all over again? Are the students given opportunities to reflect on what they missed and to find ways to fix those problems.

Here is a look at the actual lesson it’s for grade 11 (age 16 to 17) the subject is chemistry the unit is energetics and the title is calculating energy changes. The lesson itself requires students to apply prior knowledge to a new situation. The lesson is structured to identify and correct student misconceptions so the specific learning target or objective is to allow all students to analyse data and apply mathematics to make predictions about heat or enthalpy changes in chemical reactions. The lesson seeks to promote higher order thinking.

  The teacher will introduce the lesson with an image of a truck adding calcium chloride to a road. Calcium chloride is used for de-icing roads as it dissolves and gives off heat and it makes the ice melt faster. The teacher is then going to ask students if this type of reaction is exothermic or endothermic. This is intended to draw upon the students’ prior knowledge. This is a very important point in this lesson design because the teacher is not going to ask this question of the entire class or of a particular student but all students would be required to enter the LMS. The learning management system-moodle and select their response to this question. When they select their response they will receive feedback and they can reflect on this feedback and then move forward. The lesson would also include multiple means of representation and multiple means of engagement to enable reflection in action because as students make choices whether right or wrong. (This) would be met with feedback associated with the choice. Extension activities are included for students who finish ahead of time and finally and most importantly the students will be encouraged to make a reflective entry or a note into a journal about errors made and new insights and then they would be expected to return to this when they do their review for final examinations at the end of the term, the semester or the year. This reflective journal would be a very useful way of them going back and reminding themselves of the pitfalls and the errors that they would of had when they were learning this topic for the first time.

PRESENTATION LINK

REFERENCES:

 Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (2018). Learning and leading with habits of mind: 16 essential
     characteristics for success. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Leading-
     Habits-Mind-Characteristics/dp/1416607412

Kira, E., Komba, S., Kafanabo, E., & Tilya, F. (2013). Teachers’ Questioning       Techniques in 
     Advanced Level Chemistry Lessons: A Tanzanian Perspective. Australian Journal of Teacher 
    Education, 38(12). doi: 10.14221/ajte.2013v38n12.7

Reflection-in-Action Teaching Strategies Used by Faculty ... (n.d.). Retrieved from    https://
     newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=networks

Schön, D. A. (2017). Reflective Practitioner. Taylor and Francis

Strategies for Reflection. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.calacademy.org/educators /science-
    notebooks-for-reflection

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/
    vandycft/29428436431

Online Teaching and the COVID 19 Pandemic

COVID 19 has come to Bangalore and last night all schools in our state were required to close by government mandate. As a 1:1 ipad school and India's first Apple Distinguished school our administrators expect a quick shift to online teaching by all. As an Ed.D TLET student and a very experienced online teacher and learner I decided to share this lesson with my administrators. I believe it shows how this  course on Reflective Practice has been influencing my thinking and planning of lessons.
See below:

For IB 1 Classes on Monday March 16

LESSON OUTLINE.

Watch my video and study pages 170 and 171 of your text. Make some notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzngnfzDL9c

At 4:57 in the video I present a question. STOP at that point and do the question. Then play the video until the end. You will see the mark-scheme from the IB. Give yourself a mark and note your errors. I want you to reflect on what you missed and watch the video again or read the text as needed. 

If you have burning questions and you prefer to speak with me live, we will be in contact by google hangouts using our CIS email accounts.

Finally, I want you to upload a document to show your initial attempt, corrections and reflections on what you missed.

I also plan to try a live Kahoot soon and a YouTube livestream. Online school is different but we can do this. 

I will let you know about the lab projects that we left hanging soon. Meanwhile start organizing your report with what you have.

Mr. Dubay

SBL to Scaffold Teacher Reflection

After reading the recommended paper by Naidu et al. (2017) I gave some thought to designing ways to convince educators to engage in reflection for its own sake and not because it is deemed essential by administrators. Naidu et al (2017) suggest that SBL or scenario based learning is effective in helping to reflect both in action and on action. This team presented the teachers in their research sample with a scenario set around the planning of a workshop. Participants were required to use discussion forum and concept maps and other tools to structure reflection. 

I certainly agree that reflection can be taught in this way and more significantly it allows educators to reflect on the reflective process and how it should be structured. I believe that it would be best to get away from a contrived scenario and to have educators reflect on real issues.  I will illustrate this with an example. Over the last 4 years I have taught the same chemistry course to 9 cohorts and have reflected in action and on action on a wide range of issues. It is true to say that I sometimes take mental notes about a particular question or concept and if I do not act on this in some way by documenting it then the next time I recall it is when it shows up again one year later with a new group of students. The reason that this happens is because reflection is valuable but if it is documented and shared with colleagues, administrators and students then there is the potential for what is observed in action to be connected to other areas upon the completion of action. Reflective conversation sometimes happen incidentally. Consider the science teacher who hears a conversation between two maths teachers about students challenges with understanding significant figures. This insight will allow the science teacher to better understand how to guide students with this topic. 

Documenting reflections on an active forum on a weekly basis could prove very useful but it is essential that administrators empower teachers to reflect in a meaningful way. When teachers reflect on issues that have meaning to them they are likely to be more engaged in follow up conversations with colleagues that will lead to further reflection. The lesson below was created in response to my observations in action as I worked through a problem with my students. I then reflected post-lesson to create this video which I can share with colleagues and students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q4od5qfY8s&t=34s

Conclusion:

The SBL approach to reflection in a structured way is indeed very useful but if real scenarios exist then colleagues with similar cohorts and common course or topics should network and reflect using an online forum. Social media could be utilised to create reflective groups for educators.

Reference:
Karunanayaka, S. P., Naidu, S., Rajendra, J. C. N., & Ratnayake, H. U. W. (2017). Designing Reflective 
      Practice in the Context of OER-based e-Learning. Retrieved from:  https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext
     /EJ1149180.pdf