Reflective Writing

I recently read Jessica's blog post, and her intial thoughts totally mirrored exactly how I feel about this kind of task! I have no idea what it is, wether it be the many hours we spent in college writing up all lessons we had done that day or week, and all the 'corrections' from each class.....Or it could be that I'm extremely apprehensive about studying myself  and reflecting on it. Which as I write that, I know shouldn't be the case, but I think one of my major weaknesses as a dancer and performer, was that I really did not enjoy critiquing myself. I would much rather dance in front of a teacher or a colleague, or even a complete stranger, and have them tell me how I can improve, than stand in front of a mirror  and really watch myself, or even worse, record it and watch myself back. I think this comes from insecurities brought about at college over weight and appearance, which of course is a massive part of any performers career, but I'm hoping some of you can agree with me when I say, it definitely knocked my confidence, and still does now in 'normal' life and how people perceive me.

Which leads on to this task. Now I am not performing anymore and concentrating more on my progression as a teacher, I decided to reflect on my teaching classes rather than the dance classes I now do for fun! So it has taken me a little longer to reflect using the different ways to do so, on some occasions I doubled up and tried to reflect on the one class in two different ways to see if I got anything different out of it.


Describing the class was the easy part for me, and I found myself using this after most classes as a kind of summary for myself, to then use that to reflect on in the different ways. I enjoyed questioning myself (Initial reflection) with the examples given in the handbook. 'What did you feel about it? what were you thinking?' etc. I find it much easier to answer direct questions like this and expand on the answers to lead me to my reflection and how to progress from there!

Now, I LOVE making lists!! In fact I have just wrote a list of what I still need to do for this module and then prioritise what needs to be done in what order. I make a list of jobs I need to around the house, a list of bills that need to be paid, I love writing my Christmas card list........however, I couldnt really see how making a list of words used to describe my class or day could help me reflect. I thought making a list of further things I may want or need to research was useful, such as a specific choreographer or technique, but I felt that these were more reminders than a useful reflection tool.

Evaluating the class was quite the norm for me as a teacher. I will generally reflect upon a class using this tool- what went well? what didnt go well? what the kids enjoyed? wether any of them had come to me with requests or concerns about what they want to do next time? This is, and always has been, successful for me as I like to think about how the class went and what we can do with that next class.

I found I couldn't really get into drawing graphs and Charts, I would generally associate this method with numbers and statistics and wasnt sure how to make it into a reflective tool.  However, something I did try was  an exercise showed to us on our first campus session taken by Paula. Where we drew a 'head' and we prioritised what was most important to us at that particular moment, ie that first campus session 'BAPP' was in a huge bubble right at the front of my 'head', with other bubbles around it. This was a fun way to reflect on my day, I also tried doing a few a day to record what was at the forefront of my mind at different parts of the day!

I took on the Another View as if I were being watched by a peer who I worked with. Looking at how I interacted with the children from an outside point, and what else I might have included in the class where possible.

Overall, I didn't realise how much I actually use some of these tools subconsciously, however not necessarily writing them all down, which is something I will definitely be taking away from this task and continuing to use the different ways of reflection dependent on the situation!