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