Not currently scheduled
Duration: 4 weeks
Credits: 1.5 CEUs
Price: US $200
In brief: In this four-week course participants will become familiar with literature on critically reflective practice and will explore its potential value and implications for their everyday teaching and professional practice. They will be invited to engage with challenges or conundrums in their teaching practices, to consider new ways to frame and approach those situations, and to share their experiences and perspectives when comfortable doing so. As participants explore tools and strategies intended to foster critical reflection, they will have opportunities to apply approaches that they find generative for their own pedagogical practice, while also considering the limitations of those approaches.
As teaching librarians look to find meaning and purpose in our instructional work, while also sustaining ourselves and caring for ourselves and our students, many have found value in reflective practice (ongoing reflection that informs active teaching practice). Some have given particular attention to critically reflective practice. Critically reflective practice emphasizes the importance of investigating assumptions, which are often difficult to see until we break out of our everyday experiences and thinking, and considering them through different lenses. Such assumptions may exist on various levels, including the individual, collective, and cultural. (See, for example, Stephen Brookfield and Barbara Larrivee’s work.)
Critically reflective practice can be particularly generative for reframing challenges in teaching and learning and for approaching them from fresh angles. This process of investigating assumptions and exploring new ways of seeing, framing, and creatively engaging with problems and experiences is often best done in supportive communities, rather than in isolation.
In this four-week course participants will become familiar with literature on critically reflective practice and will consider its potential value and implications for their everyday teaching and professional practice. They will be invited to engage with challenges or conundrums in their teaching practices, to consider new ways to frame and approach those situations, and to share their experiences and perspectives when comfortable doing so. As participants explore tools and strategies intended to foster critical reflection, they will have opportunities to apply approaches that they find generative for their own pedagogical practice, while also considering the limitations of those approaches. In the first week of class participants will reflect on a proposed set of grounding principles for how we wish to engage with one another as a learning community and will augment them as needed.
Course Structure:
- Week 1 – Introduction to Critically Reflective Practice in Theory and Practice
- Week 2 – Investigating Assumptions: Exploring Experiences and Literature through Stephen Brookfield’s Four Lenses for Critical Reflection
- Week 3 – (Re)framing and Metaphor as Critically Reflective Tools
- Week 4 – Next Steps for Our Individual and Shared Practices
Learning Outcomes:
- Become familiar with the concept of critically reflective practice and with literature that explores its relevance to teaching, learning, and librarianship.
- Explore the significance of critically reflective practice to our individual and collective instructional work.
- Engage with tools and strategies intended to foster critically reflective teaching and apply those tools or strategies that are generative for one’s own pedagogical practice.
Registration Information
Participants may register up through the first week of a course. Please email abaer at inquiringteachers dot com with the registrant name(s), email address(es), and the course in which they wish to enroll.
Within one business day you will receive a registration confirmation and payment information. Payments can be made with personal or institutional credit cards or PayPal. If your institution prefers to receive a billing statement or to make purchase order, please indicate this in your email message.
About Inquiring Teachers Courses
In a small online community participants learn about pedagogical theories and practices relevant to information literacy education, while also developing an instruction plan for their unique teaching contexts. Throughout these courses participants provide one another with feedback and receive individualized feedback from the instructor. All courses are asynchronous, with flexible weekly schedules.
This professional development is unique in its emphasis on reflection and community and in its integration of learning research, accessible theory, and everyday teaching practice. To foster this environment, classes are small (no more than 15 people) and all participants are given ongoing personalized and detailed feedback. All courses are facilitated by educator and instruction librarian Andrea Baer, Ph.D.
(All Inquiring Teachers courses count as electives for the Certificate in Library Instruction from Library Juice Academy.)
Privacy Information
Courses are taught through the digital platform MoodleCloud. When registrants first log in to MoodleCloud, they are required to accept the site’s Privacy Policy and Cookies Policy in order to use the site. When a registrant is enrolled in a course, their name and email are added to the course’s MoodleCloud site. Inquiring Teachers does not share any additional user information with MoodleCloud.
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