1 Reflecting on your learning and teaching

This handbook offers many evidence-based strategies and frameworks, and one way to make the most of them is to leverage the same scholarly skills you bring to your discipline by reflecting on the specifics of your own teaching practice. Building a reflective teaching practice relies on an ongoing process of critical reflection on our individual experiences as learners and teachers. In Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Stephen D. Brookfield defines reflective teaching as a “sustained and intentional process of identifying and checking the accuracy and validity of our teaching assumptions” (Brookfield, 2017, p. 3). Critical reflection involves identifying and examining our underlying attitudes toward teaching and carefully considering evidence of our own teaching practices within the broader goal of improving students’ learning. This regular, deliberate self-monitoring and self-evaluating practice helps develop pedagogical awareness and increases the effectiveness of instructors.

Brookfield suggests four lenses that can help analyze teaching and question assumptions about it: students’ feedback, colleagues’ perceptions, personal experiences, and theory and research. To explore students’ perceptions, you might carefully review their evaluations and feedback. To analyze colleagues’ perceptions, you might request peer feedback and classroom observations (to schedule them, you can reach out to colleagues in your department or to Center for Teaching staff at teaching@uiowa.edu). For self-assessment, some instructors find it helpful to use reflective journals and create an ongoing narrative of their teaching across semesters and various courses. Another way to reflect on your teaching is to use teaching inventories and sets of reflective questions. Our Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) program was developed to support you in reflecting on your teaching practice through studying its effectiveness on students’ learning. SoTL contributes to and is inspired by evidence-based teaching practices.

💡 To begin your self-reflection, we invite you to recall a positive, significant learning experience that you had as a learner.