Introduction

“I guess it was from there that I really wanted to be a teacher. It felt like a powerful
position to be in”. (F.Noor, Learning Autobiography: 2006)

I was asked whether Id feel like this in 6 weeks time, and my response was yes. Well I
will tell you a story of how this changed. Mattingly (1991) developed the story telling
method with teaching professionals. This is done by constructing a narrative
demonstrating what happened and why, what was expected to happen, what it meant
to the narrator and how it would have affected future teaching. This helps to make
sense of an experience and aids reflection. (Active Learning in Higher Education,
2001: pp134).

Imagine if you would an obstacle course, you are the fastest runner, you are motivated
by competition and the higher the obstacle the faster you run to go over it. Suddenly,
you fall and you are no longer able to run, only hop. Now how do you feel?
De-motivated perhaps? Maybe even lose your confidence. This is how I feel now,
which is far from what I felt at the beginning of the year. A series of unfortunate
events occurred through one critical incident. Brookfield (1990) describes critical
incident to be a significant event, it may be significant because of its success or its
failure.

The critical incident was my very first lecture on economics; I delivered to BA/Dip
HE Business Operations students. I felt that the lecture went well considering it was
my very first and I had no clue about economics. I only knew about Margaret
Thatcher and how she bought the Trade Unions down. I had good student response
and developed an interactive relationship with them. However the teacher who
observed me crucified me, I appreciate constructive criticism but this was something
else. At that point I felt like a total impostor. I had taken her words to heart and felt
that I do not deserve to be there, I am not a competent professional and I don’t know
what I am doing. This is exactly how Brookfield (Becoming a Critically Reflective
Teacher: pp 229) describes Impostor Syndrome to be. However the feedback I
received from the students were great, they felt like they learnt something as they
were able to participate, they said ‘we didn’t realise economics could be fun’. If you
refer to my Journal it will give you a deeper insight into my feelings as an impostor.
As time went on this feeling became deeper and deeper and I felt even worse because,
especially in lectures my feelings of impostor ship were reflected to my students.
Brems, Baldwin, Davis and Namyniuk (1994: as cited in Becoming a Critically
Reflective Teacher) say that teachers who feel like impostors are not favoured by
students. An impostor teacher makes students feel anxious and doubtful about the
teacher’s ability.

Elbaz (1987) adds; that teachers who feel like an impostor have a destructive
tendency to accept all the blame for failure in a particular situation. I was becoming
destructive, however more in my attitude towards teaching; this is reflected in my
second journal for semester two. The response that I received from my tutor was a
virtual ‘kick on my butt’ and this made me really think about reflection and how I can
use reflection to create a positive second semester. As suggested; I referred to ‘Kolb’s
Learning Cycle’ in which teaching is the concrete experience and knowledge is
created through the transformation of experience. (Active Learning in Higher
Education, 2001: pp 132).

Though I was defensive to my tutor’s response I could not stop thinking about what
she had said and this made me feel disappointed in myself. I kept wondering what
teaching meant to me and am I in the right profession. Kolb says that through
abstracting a meaning from an experience, it will result in a theory or a personal
record of what has happened. (Active Learning in Higher Education, 2001: pp 132)
What I had extracted was my weakness and this was ‘planning’. Lack of planning
seemed to be affecting everything I do so with the final stage of Kolb’s cycle in mind,
which is to put into practice what I had learnt. I bought a diary and began to make a
daily action plan. I also started to record things in my interactive action plan on
pebble pad and shared it with my tutor.

I was seeing a slight improvement in the planning aspect of my teaching but I still did
not feel any better about myself. I felt like I did not belong in my STE placement, I
did not fit into the culture of that place. Also I was becoming more and more critically
reflective. My tutor did make a comment about this in response to our conversations
regarding planning. She said:

“You are really starting to think more reflectively-and question yourself

intuitively- and this is exciting but scary too”. (Julie Hughes: 2007)

As it turns out there is such thing as cultural suicide in the teaching profession. I came
across this theory when I was doing my ‘creative power-point journal’.

In a hostile culture critically reflective teachers can be labelled as subversive trouble

makers, (Brookfield: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher: Chapter 11. pp 235).
As Miller (1990) adds; it’s probably because a lot of people want to remain as they
are. They don’t like it when questions are asked or alternatives are posed. Please refer
to my ‘power-point journal’ where I describe why I feel like I have committed
‘cultural suicide’. I remember a conversation I had with my observation mentor in
placement. It was regarding my teaching methods in lecture theatres after an
unsuccessful observation.

“There is no room for reflective practitioners in HE, especially here, your methods
are juvenile”. (Observation mentor: 2007)

This statement made me realise that all this questioning myself and feeling like I am
not good enough to be a teacher, all the feelings that made me miserable was because
I was teaching in the wrong sector. If I was to be using this method in FE than
perhaps I would fit in.

Brookfield (1994) writes that critical reflection is tinged with sadness. Though my
story must end now and it does end on a sad note for me as I am no longer in
placement. I have not totally lost out. Before I tell you in my own words what I have
positively gained, I would like to quote Jackson (1992):

“We might possibly develop a more hesitant manner, a kind of pedagogical

stammer, as a result of our reflection and our newly won insight. We also may not
feel any better as a teacher either. Again we might actually feel worse, at least
temporarily: more doubt ridden, puzzled, sadder perhaps. After all, sadness and
wisdom are not incompatible”. (Jackson: 1992, Becoming a Critically Reflective
Teacher, pp 239)

So what have I learnt?

Well, for one, I do feel sadder, I am also doubtful about everything, mainly my own
abilities. I feel as though everything that was positive about me; especially my
confidence has been chipped away. More so I have lost my innocence and this is
exactly what the quote above refers to. In my ‘Learning Autobiography’ I was full of
optimism but now I’m perhaps a bit cynical. Of course I have learnt all the common
things you would expect from this situation, which are; plan better, be more
professional, communicate better with colleagues and so on. The thing that is less
obvious and that I have learnt about myself is that I am far wiser. As Jackson (1992)
says sadness and wisdom go hand in hand. I am not only wiser in terms of handling
things better, but I have gained wisdom about myself. I realise that I am not
indestructible, that I have mistaken being stubborn for being passionate. Whilst I sit
on the bench of uncertainty about my career I know that in September when I repeat
my placement I will take with me ‘wisdom’ and that will be my biggest asset.

The people who helped me to survive:

I cannot carry on further without mentioning my peers who I consider as my friends.
Each time I tumbled down and had a crisis it was my peers who helped me through it.
I had written about this in my power point journal and also quoted a passage from
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (chapter 11:pp 244). Please refer to it for
quote.
Not only new teachers need a community, even experienced teachers need a small
community that they can laugh and cry with. In the Nias’s Study (1989) where half
the mid career teachers said:
“there had always had to be somebody to talk to, or I think I would have
cracked up a long time ago”. (Becaoming a Critically Reflective Teacher,
chapter 11, pp 244).
If I’m entirely honest, I can say exactly the same thing, if it had not been for my peers
and friends who gave me comfort and encouragement and ultimately confidence I
would have walked away from this course with nothing.

I would like to finish this section with a final quote by a reflective practice student:

“I am no longer uncertain about being uncertain: uncertainty is now my

mantra”

(Source: Gillie Bolton: 2005, An Introduction to Reflective Practice)

Being a Reflective Practitioner:

In semester one and some parts of semester two I had reflected in a descriptive way.
What I mean is that I used to reflect on what happened but never in a critical way. I
never focused on any critical incidents, I was quick to make judgements and
assumptions and blame others. Gillie Bolton (2005) states that once we start to trust
the reflective and reflexive processes, we will begin to perceive the areas you need to
tackle. Discovering what you need to reflect upon and the route to altering things is an
exhilarating journey. (G Bolton, 2005: An Introduction to Reflective Practice)
I would call it more of an emotional journey; however it does become exhilarating
once things start to make sense.

If I am honest with you I am not entirely sure what sort of a teacher I am, I thought I
was and would like to consider myself to be an interactive teacher. I cannot remember
many of the small things or even the positive aspects of me as a teacher because the
big events had taken over my life, literally. Sharkey (2004) adds that; the events we
forget most need reflection, we need to attend to the untold. (An Introduction to
Reflective Practice: 2005). Plato (cited in An Introduction to Reflective Practice
2005) says that education is finding pathways to what we do not know we know. Well
in that case, I did not know that people, in particular my peers considered me to be
knowledgeable and confident.
I desperately wanted reflect on those small things, the things that I had forgotten,
therefore I started to create a story board journal reflecting on semester two. The story
board consisted of clip art pictures reflecting emotion, some were cartoons and some
were photographs. I began to remember why I wanted to do this course in the first
place; I also remembered how I feel when I get encouragement and positive response.
I also remembered what had de-motivated me as a teacher and that is that I never
received positive response and encouragement from my colleagues. Doyle (2004)
says that the exploration of experience, knowledge, values, identity that matters rather
than any attempt to arrive at a ‘true’ account. However I did gain experience in HE
which most of my other peers have not had experience in, I also gained knowledge as
a teacher and developed values which will underpin my teaching career in future
years. As for identity, well that will come in time.

My development as a reflector has been like a mountain- first high than low. I started
off as a good reflector and slowly became descriptive rather than reflective. My first
reflective essay is evidence of this. Through time I started to explore not just my
personal feelings but the incidents which caused those feelings. I reflected on them
creatively, furthermore I was reading Brookfield and others and was able to attach
theories to my incidents. In a way this made me feel better as everything I was feeling
was written about. From Impostor syndrome, cultural suicide to road running. I
believe that it was after the power-point journal that I truly began to appreciate
reflection. G. Bolton (2005) reflective practice is creative adventure; she also adds
that reflective practice can transform our narrow range of experience to something
broad with potential scenarios. It brings out in us a vital human drive-that is to create
stories about our lives and communicate them. This is exactly what I am doing!

The point is that I am no longer using reflective practice as a confession tool, as I

have done in the past. Bleakley (cited in An Introduction to Reflective Practice) adds
that confession can be a conforming mechanism; it is used to pass responsibility to
others. I used to complain that ‘how can I work in such a politically driven
environment?’ I know that I blamed others for most of my misfortune at placement. I
must take responsibility also.

I cannot finish this piece of writing without commenting on ‘observations’.

I will start with observations; as a student teacher I understand how important it is to
be observed by peers and colleagues. However, as suggested in Active Learning in
Higher Education (2001) observation is a very sensitive issue, it is often used to make
a judgement rather than to inform a process or disseminate good practice. In semester
1 I felt uncomfortable with the though recording my observations of my colleagues in
placement. Therefore I used more creative methods to record it, it seemed less critical
and was rather fun. I also learnt a lot from it, such as teacher-student behaviour and
interaction. In semester two I realised observations were a vital part of teaching
practice and every teacher had to be observed in order to maintain good practice.
Hopkins (1993) suggests five key principles of observations but I will talk about the
first point which is: a climate of trust needs to be established between the observer
and the observed, before the observation starts. I picked this point out because when I
was being observed by my observation mentor and indeed by my other colleagues, I
never really understood what they wanted.

Yes, upon critical reflection I did realise that it was because we had our wires crossed.
I was teaching FE style and they were observing me under HE criteria’s. Neither party
thought to clear any confusion; hence I did not trust the observers and indeed became
scared of observations.

What it means to be a critically reflective teacher:

“I guess it was from there that I really wanted to be a teacher. It felt like a powerful
position to be in” (Fatema Noor, Learning Autobiography: 2007).

What I meant by the above statement was that, I wanted to change the world.
Brookfield (1995) wrote that by helping students learn, we will help them act towards
each other and toward their environment, with compassion, understanding and
fairness. He took the words out of my mouth, because those are the reasons why I
want to teach. Brookfield (1995) is also right when he says that our attempts to
increase love and justice in this world are never simple or unambiguous. I have found
this out through this course and I have come crashing down from la la land. However,
I have not changed my mind about teaching. I still want to change the world and I’m
still going to try. But, I am not going to be so naïve and I will be less stubborn.

I have learnt a lesson, to date it has been the hardest lesson and it is summed perfectly
by Brookfield:

‘One of the hardest things teachers have to learn is that the sincerity of their
intentions does not guarantee the purity of their practice’.

Conclusion:

So what does the future hold for me?

Well I will continue my teaching practice element in September, with a fresh
approach. I hope to put into practice everything that I have learnt.
Looking back, everything happens for a reason and though I have regrets about not
completing this year I know that my experience will lead me to become a better
teacher. I have indeed become wiser.

Remember ‘road runner and coyote’- the cartoon where coyote is always chasing road
runner and he ends of falling. Well like coyote I have fallen to the canyon floor many
times. Although coyote did not have broken bones or blood, I did but they were in the
form of tears and emotional instability. There is no guarantee in this world but one
thing I can guarantee is that I will fall but I will have a parachute which will stop me
from getting broken bones and blood.
Name: Fatema Noor

Student Number: 0375665

Module Title/Code: Reflective Practise

PC3012

Unit 3: Reflective Essay

Award Title/Code: PGCE PCE

Tutor: Julie Hughes

11/05/07

“No substantial part of this assignment has been submitted previously

for the purposes of assessment to the University of Wolverhampton or
any other educational establishment”

Fatema Noor