Reflection task: questions about your teaching

Pat Hutchings identifies four categories of questions you might ask about your teaching:

    1. Is it working?
    2. What does it look like?
    3. What might it look like?
    4. How do we make meaning of this?

 

This reflection task consists of five main steps.

Step 1: Formulate a question
Choose one of these categories and formulate a specific question about your own teaching and/or the learning it supports.

Step 2: Analyze your question
For your question, consider the following and write down your thoughts:

      • What aspects of it might be specific to your context, and what aspects might be general across a broader context?
      • What do you already know that can help you begin to formulate a strategy for answering your question?
      • What do you need to find out to develop your strategy?
      • Who do you know that could help you gather the information you need and/or carry out your strategy?

Step 3: Share your work
Share your work with a trusted colleague. Think about the feedback you would like to have and where you can go from here.

Step 4: Revise your question 
Chance are you will no longer be satisfied with your question as you originally wrote it. Revise it now. You will probably revise it again. This is an important part of the process. The intuition we begin with forms an important starting point for asking questions about our teaching, but we need to modulate that intuition to convert it into a meaningful question that can guide SoTL work (Poole, 2018). Analyzing and discussing your initial question are important first steps.

Step 5: Next steps
Reflect on the task you've just completed. Write down your ideas about what you could do next if you were to investigate your question. If you can't get started right away, write down the things you would need to have in place to be able to start.

 

Try this with colleagues!
This task works as an individual exercise, but you can also to it together with other academic teachers.

If you work in a teaching team, whether for a course or a program, you can do this task as a team. Begin by individually formulating questions you each have about your shared teaching practice. Next, pool the questions and group them by category or theme. Pick one to start with and do Step 2. You might also combine similar questions to create a new question that addresses different perspectives together. Or, you could work through Step 2 for each individual question and then compare your findings across questions.

You could also gather a group of interested colleagues. Start by each formulating an individual question, then work collaboratively though Step 2 for each person's question.

 

Final thoughts
You can do this for all four categories. There might be one category that seems most valuable to you right now. You might end up formulating a question that you can investigate right away. There might also be categories that seem more useful in the long term, and questions that you might want to keep in mind but that you can't investigate right away. 

Consider keeping a living collection of questions about your teaching. Organize them according to these categories and separate them into subcategories such as short-term and long-term, easy and difficult, simple and complex, individual and collaborative, etc. Refer to your collection regularly to see where you are in understanding your own teaching and your students' learning.

 

Hutchings, P. (Ed.). (2000). Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Open access: Scanned PDF available here: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED449157

Poole, G. (2018). Using intuition, anectode, and observation. In Chick, N (Ed.), SoTL in Action: Illuminating Critical Moments of Practice. Stylus: Sterling, Virginia.