What's in it for you?

At the heart of effective learning, teaching and assessment are the law teachers, and individuals engaged in information and communication technology (ICT) and library support. Advancing the expertise and knowledge base of those actively involved in legal education is essential to the development of reflective learning, both for the teachers and the students they teach. Speaking about the professional role of teachers in higher education, Beaty maintains:

“Reflective practice is important to the development of all professionals because it enables us to learn from experience. Although we all learn from experience, more and more experience does not guarantee more and more learning. 20 years of teaching may not equate to 20 years of learning about teaching but may be only one year repeated 20 times. There are many times when our normal reactions to events are insufficient themselves to encourage reflection. We should not rely solely on our natural process of reflecting on experience, but actively seek ways to ensure that reflection itself becomes a habit, ensuring our continuing development as a professional teacher in higher education.”

— (1997:8)

Reflecting on our own performance as teachers is one form of feedback. Keeping a reflective diary about your own experience as a teacher helps you to reflect and learn from experience. In re-reading a diary many new lecturers find that over time they have developed strategies to deal with particular teaching problems. Many in-house staff development programmes for new lecturers take this approach and use it as part of the formal assessment. However, reflective practice is not just for new lecturers but is also a way of continually challenging current behaviour and ensuring that teaching is developed and enhanced. Established lecturers wishing to beomce Registered Practitioners of the Higher Education Academy are required to complete a reflective element precisely to illustrate how their teaching practice has developed over time and as their career and teaching requirements change.

You may wish to use reflection to inform your thinking about a specific module, to evaluate the development of a new style of teaching or assessment, or as a more general aid to your teaching practice.

Exercise

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1. Identify the incident you wish to reflect upon (for example one teaching session).
2. Write down what you intended to do in the session.
3. Write down what actually happened.
4. Write down how you feel about this and why you think you the session evolved as it did.
5. Identify ways in which you could approach the session differently next time (Beaty, 1997).
6. Repeat after each session or fortnightly to get a picture of the way in which the course develops. This approach helps you to see the progression of the course through the eyes of your students.

Engaging in reflection on teaching in this way helps law teachers to monitor their own practice and change it according to what they hope to achieve. As Webb argues:

“If we are to become more effective teachers, we need to become more reflective teachers. To be reflective we need to articulate our theories of learning, critically examine them and replace those parts which, we suspect or, better still, can show do not work.”

— (1996:30)

To bring about change effectively and model good reflective practice for students law teachers need to engage in and model the ideas, practices and processes that are conducive to such learning. Understanding how we learn as teachers and recognising the influence of colleagues around us helps us to support students in their learning and interaction with others. As McGill and Brockbank suggest:

“Consciously engaging in reflective practice enables the teacher to learn from and therefore potentially enhance their practice and learning about their practice. Practice here can include teaching, encouraging learning, research, scholarship, course design and management. Indeed, it can include any of the myriad activities of the professional teacher.”

— (McGill and Brockbank, 1998:72)

Example 7 mirrors the conversational and reflective approach being advocated and illustrates the benefits of reflective practice for teachers. As this account illustrates, the reflective comments made by students can be an illuminating source of information for law teachers. Students’ perspectives, attitudes, responses and feelings all provide rich data for law teachers to use as a prompt for reflection on their own teaching. However, it is important to be clear about the purpose of reflection. If teachers can use the diaries to inform and enhance their own teaching then all power to the process. However, students need to be clear that this is a mechanism for supporting their learning, distinct and separate from an evaluation of the course or teaching.

Reflection can legitimately be used to evaluate teaching. There are a number of a ways of collecting data as the following list illustrates:

1. Stop, start, continue – at the end of a teaching session ask students to call out or write on a post-it note one thing that they would like you to stop doing, one that they would like you to start and one which you are currently doing that they would like you to continue (Race, 2002).
2. Evaluation questionnaires – these can be qualitative open-ended questions or ‘tick-box’ questions. The quality of the data is usually better using the first, but can be time consuming (and potentially ego-damaging) to analyse.
3. Group discussion – promote discussion about the teaching as well as the subject. Begin by asking students to brainstorm ideas about what is good and bad about the teaching and get them to rank or vote for what they think is most important to their learning. The advantage of this approach is that it gives students a sense of collective ownership of the teaching and development of the course.

For more information on using student feedback and designing evaluation questionnaires see Beaty (1997).

Colleagues can also provide feedback on performance that can be used to aid personal and professional development. Colleagues can often tell you more about your own teaching than you can observe for yourself. A colleague’s knowledge of the discipline is helpful in providing feedback, but there are also useful tips to be gained from colleagues who do not teach in the subject area. The whole process of peer observation not only aids personal reflection on teaching, but also reinforces the idea that teaching is about dialogue and learning from experience. Having gone through this for yourself and felt what it is like to disclose fears and problems it is easier to support students going through the same process.

Exercise

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1. Choose a particular tutorial and ask a trusted colleague to observe your teaching. Ask him or her to write down three strengths and three weaknesses of your teaching.
2. After the session take time to reflect and write down for yourself what you think are the three strengths and three weakness of your teaching.
3. With your colleague go through the list and use it as a focus for discussion about how you might improve. You may wish to video the session as a prompt for the discussion. Use the feedback given to inform your teaching and to plan alternative strategies for the next session.

Many law departments and institutions now provide opportunities for peer observation. The education development unit (or equivalent) should be able to give you information about institutional schemes. You may also wish to raise the issue with the person responsible for learning and teaching in the law department.

This aim of this guide has been to provide a framework for the development of reflection and associated techniques within the context of legal education. The guide is not comprehensive in covering all the associated educational theory, but hopefully there are some useful ideas that spark the imagination to translate some of the ideas into practice. It is easy (and perhaps convenient?) for traditionalists to ignore reflective practice as a new trend and hope that the time will come when didactic teaching methods will again reign triumphant. Given the ever-changing pace of contemporary society this is unlikely. Reflective practice is a realistic and achievable way of enhancing student learning while developing the types of knowledge, skills and abilities that are expected of graduates in today’s society. It is also a way of ensuring that students gain the resilience and resourcefulness they need to continue to be lifelong learners and/or effective lawyers. As Macfarlane points out:

“Teaching students to develop self-conscious habits of reflectiveness in order that they might become ultimately intuitive is critical to education and training. While a reflective practice paradigm may have deficiencies, it appears to clearly offer a more sophisticated and comprehensive model for education and professional development than either legal science or skills-based technocracies.”

— (1998:17)

The introduction of reflection into legal education poses pedagogical, practical and political challenges to the existing status quo, but it has the potential to transform learning for students. A modest proposal is that given commitment to enhanced learning and a supportive climate reflective practice can:

• significantly increase student motivation for learning
• recognise individual progress
• value on-going achievement
• enhance and develop forms of collaborative learning
• increase learner independence
• enhance confidence

Last Modified: 4 June 2010