Adique, Anne Nicole C.
The Reflective Teacher
Group A Assignment number 1
Every good teacher wants their students to learn to their maximum capability - more
skillful than before the teachers taught them. While the knowledge is important to learn by
the students, it is also vital to teach them kindness, compassion, and fairness. Since above
mentioned statements are one of our goals as a teacher, how can we achieve to reach our
goals while being a critical thinker?
Critical Reflection as defined by Brookfield in 1995, is the sustained and intentional
process of identifying and checking the accuracy and validity of our teaching assumptions.
In this, our assumptions as teachers came from different sources, from our previous
experiences as a student to a teacher, a help from our mentor or fellow teacher, or
somehow can be researched, and read through books, journals and theses. Usually, in this
we believe in whatever we hear, or we read because of the responses of our students and
do they accept the output.
Being a critically reflective teacher means that you have to constantly remind yourself
as an educator to continually research how the learning environment is experienced by
students and with this, it’s a must to engage in a critical conversation. The process
encourages growth through analysis of the learning environment and makes informed
decisions. Like students, teachers also need growing and improving as an educator.
Brookfield also enumerated that critical reflection has two distinct purposes. First is
the Illumination of Power. Inside the four corners of a classroom, teachers are being looked
up by the students thus, having the said “power”. Educators viewed their classroom as their
own domain, or their own world in which they have the control. Teachers have all the energy
to make their own decisions, timing, and flow during the discussions. Students also don’t
have the ability to choose what kind of teaching approach a teacher should do; everything
is on the decision of the teacher. Teachers usually like to make discussions with the
students, especially when the topic is interesting. In my case as a trainer, the different
perspectives given by my students, since most of them are older and more experienced
than me, overwhelms me. Usually, this is of a conversation I say few words because my
students are talking so much. There is little silence in the room, what conversation there is
focuses on relevant issues, and the level of discourse is properly refined. A critically
Adique, Anne Nicole C. The Reflective Teacher
Group A Assignment number 1
reflective teacher will be concerned to check whether or not her sense of pleasure in a
discussion is matched by that of her students. This kind of teacher will find a way of
compiling a regular emotional audit of how the conversation is experienced. He/She will
know when to have participation or when to call for cut of discussion to focus on the relevant
topic discussed.
Hegemonic assumptions, on the other hand, are assumptions that we think are in our
own best interests but that actually work against us in the long term (Brookfield, 1995). One
example would be the Perfect Ten Syndrome. Teachers usually take pride on their
knowledge and wisdom, they always want to be good in what they do, and because of this,
students’ leave good scores on the evaluations of their teaching. However, teachers
somehow assume the worst. All of the good feedbacks are often forgotten, while the
negative ones stay. If the teacher constantly received negative feedbacks, it usually leads
to feelings of guilt concerning their incompetence as an educator. While teachers keep the
feelings to themselves, the sense of failure becomes intolerable. To be honest, this one of
the situations where I struggle to be in – I always tend to think that I don’t deserve to be an
educator once I receive negative feedbacks from my students, or even by my mentors.
Sometimes, teachers are convinced that they are the only ones who receive bad
evaluations while others are being loved. However, a critically reflective teacher recognizes
the error of assuming that good teaching is always equal to good student evaluations.
Teachers who are like this understands that different students have different opinions.
Given the diversity of classroom and students, no actions a teacher takes can ever be
experienced as uniformly positive. Reality speaking, teachers are almost bound to be liked
if they never challenge students' taken for granted ways of thinking and behaving, or if they
allow them to work only within their preferred learning styles.
Upon reading the article, I realized that it is difficult to be a critical thinker, especially
when you are a teacher. It is challenging because somehow, you need to let go of your
current assumptions, and know that there’s always something to improve about yourself.
It’s good to know it and apply it first hand, but even if it’s not – there’s always a time to
improve for the better.
