WEEK 26 - Reflect on Your Inquiry (Take Action) - Notes

Gibbs Cycle of Reflection - from video

Challenge you, your knowledge and your values

Describe briefly - key facts only - don’t waste word count

Feelings - what influenced them? Did they change during the event? Did they affect your actions?

Evaluation - Your judgments at the time, what contributed to them? How do you feel about them now? Try to stand back and look at the bigger picture

Analysis - start looking at the experience in depth and focus on vital aspects - were there key issues that affected something or someone? Eg lack of knowledge, communication or time management? What was the issue? What should have happened? Are there theories to understand the situation and improve next time? Examine all the influencing factors and discover ways to improve.

Conclusions - Complete the key points learned through reflective practice and what to improve next time. identify any training needs or skills which could be developed further - this will inform your action plan

Action Plan - is the same thing happens again you will be in a more informed and considered position to deal with it.

Remember its impossible to do everything right the first time.

Demonstrating your ability to reflect may just give you the edge in the future.

Figure 3: Rolfe’s Model of Reflection (Otago Polytechnic, n.d.)

The What? part is simply describing the situation. The So what? part is where what happened is analysed and explained, often in relation to supporting literature. It is where most of the references will be, if required. Rolfe et al. consider the final part Now what? as the one that can make the greatest contribution to practice.

Reflect on one event that has happened so far since you started

Understand feelings

Evaluation and analysis

Conclusion - new action plan - new cycle

This model if a cycle

Easy and straightforward to follow - personal experience

More complicated - 3 steps

Descriptive - quite similar

Other 2 stages - comparative - get other people involved and get their views

Then critically reflect -   context nit just personal view

Thinks that a social context will improve reflection

Description - inform the reflection using resources - what happened

Evaluate what happened

This is simple to employ and helps us when we don't usually write down our reflections.

These are the major theories introduced.

Your Teacher Inquiry question

How can the use of robotics and learning within collaborative groups be used to promote student engagement and have positive impacts on mathematical outcomes?

Step 1 (What): Describe something that is significant and has happened during your Inquiry so far

So far I have been teaching students about multiplication using robotics. Following the number knowledge tests, I discovered that multiplication and division was an area that my target students needed teaching on.

The most notable or difficult event so far - realising that the robotics activities that I had set up for students to work on independently in collaborative groups were not engaging for the students. They were not engaged in the activity or working collaboratively - they were opting out.

This is happening in the Take Action phase.

I was involved as the class teacher and the person organising and arranging the activities for the students to do. Also involved were the students and most notably the students that I have identified as my target students.

Step 2 (So What): Evaluate the most interesting/important/useful aspects of this event

The fact that the initial result for students shows that they are not engaged could be due to a number of things. It may be that students actually do not find robotics engaging. Or it may just be the robotics activities I have given them so far are not engaging. Either way, I cannot continue with the activities I am doing as students are not engaged and that will only get worse.

I think that the activities I have introduced so far may not have been challenging enough. They may have been covered in previous years at school. I need more cognitive challenge for the students.

I have no evidence as to the impact but I would suspect that they have no further knowledge at this stage that they did at the beginning.

Also there are no lessons anywhere so I am having to make up my own

Step 3 (Now What):  Analysis the implications from this event to the rest of your Inquiry

From this event, I learned that the activities I have set up are not engaging. Students are unable to manage themselves effectively and don't have the resilience to keep trying and work through an activity,

I learned that I need to keep the students closer at hand and monitor them more effectively.

I learned that I need to have fewer activities occurring at a time, so it is easier to monitor and explain and students can learn off each other more easily,

Within my inquiry I am going to change the activities I give the students, the groups, the number of different activities ie two groups will work on the same activity.

I will keep the same four teaching groups with the target students split across the groups and keep the heterogeneous groupings as they seem to be working and students are able to help each other out.

In future work out what lessons are needed and in what order. Then work out where the students are at on the continuum of lessons.

Finally teach the lessons, moving on if they are not required or engaging, Currently I have nothing to move onto quickly as I have not yet invented the lessons required. There are no resources.