Developing a Reflective Practice Workshop 2023

This workshop on Developing a Reflective Practice was offered in May 2023 for the MSU COLA Fellows. It was converted to this asynchronous format for those who weren’t able to attend.

Workshop Outline

This workshop consists of four main parts, with a reflection point separating each part. You may use the reflection prompt individually, or if you have a colleague, partner (or group of them) doing these activities together you may find it helpful to discuss and reflect together. To get the full benefit of working through these materials plan to spend about 45 minutes to watch through the videos, take the time for reflection, and to make any final notes.

Part 1 – What is Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice as defined by Donald Schon is “Thinking about one’s actions so as to engage in a process of continuous learning.” By engaging in an intentional reflective practice we are able to learn about ourselves and to make meaning from our experiences in ways that help us learn to do things differently, better, or otherwise in ways that are informed by our reflection. In this part of the workshop take some time to watch this short video and then consider the reflection/discussion prompt that follows

Watch video “What is Reflective Practice?” – 3 min 42 sec

Part 1 – Reflection/Discussion Prompt

This reflection/discussion topic is around your individual approaches to reflection and reflective practice. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:

• What are ways that you already practice reflection in your personal or professional life?
• What are the tools you use? Spaces you occupy? Time of day, etc.

Outcome from this activity: Find common methods of reflection/tools you use, and learn about other options from your discussion partners.

Part 2 – Starting Your Reflective Practice

Watch video “Starting Your Reflective Practice” – 3 min 32 sec

Part 2 – Reflection/Discussion Prompt

This reflection/discussion topic is about the approaches your discipline uses for reflection. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:

• What are the frameworks, approaches, or tools that your discipline uses for reflection?
• When does reflection occur in your discipline? Frequency?
• How might these be used by other disciplines outside of yours?
• If you have discussion partners, what are some of the ways their disciplines conduct reflective practice?

Outcome from this activity: Identify ways your discipline conducts reflective activities. Learn from other disciplines and identify other possible frameworks, approaches, or tools for reflecting.

Part 3 – Enacting Your Reflective Practice

Watch video “Enacting Your Reflective Practice” – 7 min 14 sec

Part 3 – Reflection/Discussion Prompt

This last reflection/discussion topic is about critically engaging in the activities of reflection and reflective practice. Take 5-7 minutes to think/write/discuss your thinking on the following:

• What do you see as advantages or disadvantages of the various ways of reflecting?
• What are the advantages or disadvantages/risks of
  • Reflecting in public spaces
  • Modalities (e.g. digital, paper, etc.)
  • Other considerations?
• What are the ways/modalities that you might feel comfortable reflecting?

Outcome from this activity: Consider the affordances and limitations of different ways of reflecting and where/how you might want to share your reflection or not.

Part 4 – Bringing it All Together

Take a few minutes to gather your notes and thoughts from the previous activities and then set your timer for another 5 minutes of self-reflection to set a plan up for developing/refining your reflective practice over the coming months.

If you are in the COLA Program you have to reflect at the end of the summer on all the work and thinking you are doing with the program, how might you develop and use an intentional reflective practice to document your work this summer? If you are not in the program think about how developing and implementing an intentional reflective practice might help you over the next couple of months.

How might you use the habits you form through reflective practice in these coming months to influence your teaching going forward? How might it help you in your next annual review or other reporting points, or how it might generally help you to become a better teacher, researcher, etc?

A Final Note

Remember that changing and developing habits is HARD WORK. You likely won’t develop a lasting practice overnight or in a short amount of time, a slow and steady pace is a great way to develop these habits that will last a long time.

Reflective practice is personal—the challenge is to figure out what works for you and supports your learning. Take some time to try out different things, see what works/doesn’t and what you connect with. Ask colleagues who are doing this work and learn from them.  

Some ideas to get started and/or support your practice: 

• For those wanting some guidance, this website gives 30 Daily prompts for developing a reflective teaching practice.
• Block a few minutes a day in your calendar to write, draw, talk aloud, or do whatever activities you find helpful for reflection.
• Take a walk every day at a certain time, use this time to think through ideas or to give yourself space to think and explore.
• Start a journal or a running Google doc to jot down ideas in, revisit these ideas regularly to iterate on them or connect them

This workshop was recorded on May 25, 2023 as part of the MSU COLA Fellows workshop series.

Pathways to Presencing Fellows Project – FAR Framework

Today I spent a wonderful afternoon with colleagues engaged in the Pathways to Presencing Fellows program talking about our projects and sharing ideas. The fellowship program gives “space and time” for us to engage in ways we are enacting the Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) framework.

CPIL seeks to “empower staff and faculty to put their values into intentional practice by aligning institutional practices with the values that animate university life” (Fritzsche, Hart-Davidson, & Long, 2022). Empowering all members of our community to engage in this endeavor requires us to develop a framework for individuals in a variety of university roles to excel in their careers by identifying their core values, setting career goals aligned with their values, cultivating pathways toward those goals, and enabling them to seek support along the way.

My project for this fellowship has been the development of the Formative Annual Review (FAR) Framework. While CPIL itself is a framework, the FAR framework actions CPIL into an academic reporting apparatus that facilitates formative feedback and growth. FAR helps to balance future aspirations with current needs, goals, and requirements by helping to situate what we are currently doing within our short-mid-long term goals while also acknowledging and showing our contributions and impact to our current jobs and
unit. This is especially important for those of us in positions outside of the tenure system, and doing jobs that combine applied work on our campuses, alongside more traditional scholarly endeavors such as teaching and research.

Rather than an end-of-year, reactive (or even passive) process — reporting under the FAR framework happens at one or more of several regular checkpoints during the year as a natural part of the reflective process. Reporting occurs as a function of telling a story of where you are going, what you are doing to move forward, and telling the story about how you got to the space that you are.

My short presentation on the FAR Framework gives an overview of the main components of the framework – Critical Planning, Reflective Practice, and Context Making. These components support identifying and pursuing relevant and meaningful work, redefining what scholarly work is for us, and connecting with individual professional objectives, and unit mission/goals.

I’m in the process of developing a workshop on the framework that can introduce colleagues interested in applying it to their own work. The workshop involves engaging in better understanding your digital presence, doing long-term planning, starting a reflective practice, surfacing your process, and creating artifacts as a way of telling your story, and conducting a short-term planning process.

Crafting a Digital Presence With Visitor & Resident, and Constellation Mapping

The two activities on this page will step you through an initial Visitor and Resident Map of your online presence, then using some of the places that you have identified in that work to create a constellation map of your activities. once you’ve done the activities on this page you can start to make a plan for how you are going to continue to build out and maintain your online presence in the longer term.

 Visitor and Resident Mapping

The Visitor and Resident Map is helpful in that it gives you an opportunity to critically think about the places and spaces you inhabit on the internet, both in terms of those where you leave some sort of artifact intentionally and places where you are simply visiting and using the tools, but not really intentionally leaving evidence of you having been there.

To break this down a little bit more:

Visitor: The web as a series of tools and a pool of information. You are not leaving a social trace of your being there.

Resident: The spaces and places where others are, where you express yourself or work on elements of your identity. You leave evidence of your visit there through posts, comments, or other work attributed to you.

source: V&R Mapping by David White

In addition to considering where you are a visitor and where you are a resident, you will also be considering where you use these tools for personal use versus where you use them for professional use. If you are a student you will need to think a little about the future as most of the work you do right now is probably very work/professional related or clearly personal.  However many of the places that are purely personal now (e.g. social media may be something you don’t think of as professional) may have some bearing on your professional life in the future.

To get started with Visitor and Resident map

1. Take a sheet of paper and a pen or pencil (you can also have colored pencils or markers if you want to add color to your map)  and draw an X and Y axis on the paper. 
2. On the x-axis, you’ll label “Visitor” on the left side and “Resident” on the right side, on the y-axis you will label “Personal” at the top and “Professional” at the bottom. 
3. Start to think about all of those places that you inhabit on the internet in both the visitor and the resident mode. You may wish to take a minute or two to write some ideas down in a list.
4. Now start mapping by writing down the place’s name in the area where it seems to correspond the best. For example, if you do a lot of posting on Instagram of your personal life then you might list Instagram far to the right and toward the top of the paper so it would be heavily in the Resident personal category. Your MSU email address may be very much in the lower left corner of the paper because you probably use it primarily for school work or your job, and email doesn’t really leave a presence on the internet in a resident way. 
5. Take about 5 minutes to draw out your map and consider the different places and ways you use the internet. you may find that some of these are used in various ways and or a couple of very specific ways. Be creative about how you map and be sure to make a key for yourself if you are using colors or shapes to denote something specific so you know what you were meaning when you come back to this map at a later time.

Constellation Mapping 

Mapping your online presence into a Constellation of Activities is a way of engaging actively in curating your digital presence. Just like a constellation in the night sky, your digital constellation map identifies a number of different points that when connected together represent a story, in this case, the story of you and your professional work.

To make your constellation map turn over your Visitor and Resident Map and use the back of the paper.

1. Identify at least three to five active areas from your visitor and Resident map( or areas you wish to become more active in)  that are connected to your professional goals.
2. Choose a place that serves as the center point of your constellation. this should be the place where you would direct a stranger who is asking about your work, and where you know there can be connections made to the other places where you engage professionally. this is most often something like a portfolio or a profile on a site like LinkedIn or Humanities Commons. 
3. Now start to build out the constellation map from that center point. Place your other active areas on the sheet of paper and think about how connections are made from your Center Point to those areas, as well as from one area to another. For example, are you able to link the profile of a particular tool back to your portfolio, and/or to another place that you have listed?  Draw lines connecting the points that you know are already digitally connected/linked.
4. As you draw the connections and think about this further, where are their areas that seem to be isolated or not connected at all? can you think about how to connect these? If it’s not obvious sometimes you may need to do a little searching about how to connect something back to another place, but at the very least you should be able to link from your portfolio site or main profile back to whatever activity site is in question.
5. Once you have created your constellation map it’s time to work on your portfolio or main profile site.

Building/Updating Your Portfolio or Profile

Now that you have identified your main portfolio or profile visit it and ensure that you can log in and edit when you wish. Take your constellation map and look at the connections you drew, are all of these connections represented? Do any of them need to be updated or created? Take some time to ensure that your portfolio/profile is up to date. 

Curating and Long-Term Maintenance of Your Digital Presence

One of the most difficult things that we find in working with a digital presence is maintaining and curating it over a longer period of time. Many people set up their portfolio sites and link them to places where they are doing work but fail to put a plan into place for updates and maintenance. 

It can be helpful to think about a regular schedule for going back over your digital presence and ensuring that links are still working, that you are updating it with you are more recent work, and that you are removing or migrating old content as needed. Before you finish doing these activities take a few minutes to think about what would be a reasonable schedule for you to maintain and update your work. 

Take some time to write down a reminder in your calendar to return to this on a regular basis and maybe even give yourself a reminder of what you need to do when you do return to it in order to continue this process of curation and long-term maintenance. This update schedule can be weekly, monthly, or even at the beginning/end of every semester. You may also wish to take some time to write down where/how you access the different components of your presence so it’s easily accessible when you want to make updates. 

Planning for a Blended Approach to Teaching Post-Crisis at MSU

Returning to campus after the events of Feb 13 we find ourselves in a space of continuing to process our own feelings and emotions, caring for others, and providing opportunities and space for all of us to return to our teaching and learning routines. MSU has provided guidance to our community suggesting that we use the coming weeks to be flexible and accommodating, and to plan for the remainder of the semester.

Looking back, last week was a week of shock where the work we were doing was to try to understand what happened and to get ourselves situated. This week has been one of reconnecting with our students, colleagues, and routines.

As we move into next week we need to begin to plan for what our courses will look like for the remainder of the semester once we return from Spring Break. Spring Break will be a time for rest, relaxation, and restorative activities to help us be ready to finish the semester. However, we must remember that there may be tough times or things we simply aren’t able to do that we had intended. This is OK, and we can plan for flexibility to lessen the impact it will have on our classes and work when it does happen.

Generally, as you think about adopting a blended model in your course it’s a process of reimagining when and where the labor of teaching and learning takes place. Take the opportunity to think about what the needs of you and your students are in this moment, and consider what makes the most sense to use your in-person or synchronous class time for, versus what might be best done as homework or asynchronously.

We Are Not “Returning to Normal”

Returning to a routine after an event like this is not “returning to normal,” in fact it is impossible to return to a normal state that existed prior to any event as the disruption itself has fundamentally changed the context and our understanding of it. Instead of looking for, or longing for a return to normal, it can be helpful to lean into the changes the disruption has caused, and to look for opportunities these changes provide for strengthening your teaching and professional work. 

In the context of teaching, this can mean looking at opportunities this offers you to make changes to your courses to accommodate while maintaining the connections and community you have built in your course. There are countless tools and techniques we have to make the best learning environments possible for students while still providing flexibility. Below are a few resources and ideas to help you get started. Note: If you are still working on welcoming students back to the classroom the document titled Dealing with the Aftermath of Tragedy in the Classroom is helpful for giving some ideas and language for addressing your class.

Clear Communication about Returning to Class

Your students are likely in many different places with respect to their comfort in returning to the classroom and this may continue for some time. As you welcome students back to the classroom keep in mind that clearly communicating what you are doing in class that day and why it’s important for students to be there is helpful. Some faculty have found that this extra “nudge” can be the difference between a student attending class and not. Consider how you might build in this communication before each class session in the coming weeks, perhaps even using the scheduled send feature in your email to automatically send these updates to your students.

How Can a Resilient Pedagogy Approach Help You?

Adopting some of the principles of a Resilient Pedagogy, in particular focusing on the following core principles can help your course absorb some of the shock of the change and make it easier to complete the semester for both you and your students.

Learning Objectives

Return to your learning objectives as a first step. Review them and consider what you have covered already during the semester. 

• What do you still need to cover? 
• Can you reduce the number of objectives, or reduce the components in a particular one? 
• This is not an exercise in which objectives are less important than others in general, but rather an opportunity to think about given the current situation what is most important now.

Interaction

Interaction is the heart of a college classroom. Interaction facilitates engagement, where students connect and become invested in content and move from a passive learner to an active learner. When we talk about interaction we often think about student-student, or student-instructor interaction (e.g. class discussion) but interaction extends to other types of interactions as well, including student-course content interaction, student-technology interaction, and student-world interaction. 

• How is interaction facilitated in your classroom and what might be impacted?
• You likely started the semester with certain interaction types in mind (E.g. in-person lectures or online discussions), are there opportunities to “flip” your class model to focus on allowing students opportunities to use in-class time to interact with each other and to watch lectures or do other tasks as homework?
• If a student does miss a class session what are their options for interacting with other students, you, or the course content?

Access

Maintaining access for students is important. This is both from a digital accessibility perspective (Eg. Captions, etc.) but also access in terms of students being able to get to the course content for review or if they need to miss a class session. 

• If you are giving lectures in the classroom are you able to record them and provide them to students? Have they been made easy to find in D2L or other learning management system you are using?
• For group work is there an opportunity for a student to join their group remotely or in non-class session periods? 
• Consider ways that you can be flexible and accommodating for those who may need additional time with course content, but also be honest with yourself about what you are able to do, it’s OK to put limitations on what you offer.

What Might You Do With Your Syllabus?

The syllabus is often thought of as a contract with your students. Typically the syllabus would only have minor changes during the course, but in times of crisis, there are opportunities and reasons to make changes to benefit the faculty, students, and course in general. As you consider what changes you might make to the syllabus keep in mind:

• Changes should result in streamlining course requirements, reducing workload, or shifting due dates or times. 
• Mid-Semester changes to the syllabus should never result in additional work, or confusion about the changes. 
• Ensure you are clearly communicating any changes to your students, keeping in mind that many of them have several courses that are being modified at the same time.

How Could You Use a Class Survey?

You may also want to survey your students to understand where they are at and to inform your work doing any modifications you need to do. Some ideas for this might be:

• Present students with course objectives and ask them to assess which ones they feel comfortable saying what they have learned 
• Give students a couple of possible paths forward and ask for feedback on what they might prefer (then make a decision to do one path for the whole course or allow students opportunities to choose pathways) 
• Look at the Learning that’s happened and will happen versus the outcomes you had initially set

The Enhanced Digital Learning Initiative team came up with a sample survey template you can copy and modify/use.

Communication is Key

As you make changes to the course please ensure you are clearly communicating with your students about what you are doing and why. Some ideas for this might be to cover

• Review for students how the course was structured, and how/why you are going to restructure it.
• If you are dropping activities or course goals, changing due dates, etc. clearly communicate the what and why
•  Discuss with your class what their needs are, and be clear that you will try to accommodate them as best as possible, but also note that sometimes there aren’t alternatives or accommodations that are possible.
• Make sure students have access to the most up-to-date grades you have for them so they can make informed decisions about their own academic progress outside of your class. 
• Let students know how you are going to be communicating with them so they know to look for your messages. Consider starting all emails with your course code and number (EG. “AL883: MESSAGE TITLE”) or some other way for students to easily see your message among all the others.

All of the ideas and suggestions above should be able to be implemented in your course without a shift of modality from in-person to remote or online. However, if you feel that your course or students would be better served please reach out to your Chair or Program Director to discuss options that may be available. If you need further help or ideas there are resources available on campus, please contact your local educational technology staff to discuss.

Note for readers not at Michigan State University. This post was initially intended for educators at MSU as they start our second full week of classes after the Feb 13, 2023 mass shooting. While the context and timing are specific to MSU, there are elements of this approach that may be useful at other institutions and at other times and in different situations.

Identifying Process Artifacts in our Work: Part of the Surfacing Our Work series

My colleague Shannon Kelly and I recently started a series of posts on the process of “surfacing our work.” The series focuses on the ways that, as educational technology professionals, we can work toward sharing more of our work that is in process and publishing work that has not traditionally had a publication outlet. The first post in the series is about identifying “Process Artifacts,” those artifacts that come out of the process of doing our work such as graphs, presentations, reflections, etc. Read the piece on the EDLI Website at the link below.

Surfacing Our Work: Identifying Process Artifacts (1)