Using Brookfield’s Four Lenses to Improve Your Own Teaching

Using Lens 1 – Reflection on one’s own actions and experiences as a teacher.

If you are not familiar with Brookfield's work in this area, please look at the following [1] before proceeding.

Once you have a sound grasp of the concept of The Scholarship of Teaching, the next step is to investigate the relationship between this concept and that of Reflective Practice, or more specifically Reflective Teaching.

Exercise 1

1. Identify a teaching session in which you were involved.

2. Write down what you intended or expected 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. Consider especially:

What was revealed about the relationships between the participants?
What theories (implicit and implicit) were revealed or illustrated?

5. Ask what could have been different. Consider especially:

with the benefit of hindsight, what could you have done differently?
what might have happened if you had done things differently?

6. Identify things in which you would do differently next time and explain how and why.

(As a follow-up you might find it useful to repeat the above after each session or with the same to get a picture of the way in which the course develops. This approach also helps you to see the progression of the course through the eyes of your students.)

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Using Brookfield’s Four Lenses to Improve Your Own Teaching