Reflective Teaching: Your Passport to Professional Growth
Reflective teaching is more than just a buzzword; it's like having a conversation with your past self about your teaching journey. It's about pausing at the crossroads, looking back with a critical eye, and planning your next steps with insights gained. By reflecting, we can adapt and refine our practices based on direct feedback and self-assessment.

• Mixing Lenses and Modes: Brookfield’s Four Lenses method encourages you to explore your teaching through four distinct perspectives—autobiographical, student, colleague, and theoretical. By reflecting on your own experiences, seeking student feedback, gaining insights from peer observations, and engaging with scholarly theories, you develop a well-rounded understanding of your teaching practices. To enrich this process, incorporating various reflective modalities, as suggested by Barton and Ryan, can cater to different teaching styles and enhance the depth of insights. They encourage employing different modalities that helps cater to various teaching styles and provides richer insights. You can implement this by starting a reflective journal, recording audio reflections after classes, or initiating peer discussion sessions that allow for shared reflections and collective insights. These practices promote deeper engagement and foster a broader understanding of teaching impacts. 
• Continuous Journey, Not a Destination: Reflective teaching involves continuous adjustments not just post-semester, but throughout the teaching period. By embedding reflection into our daily teaching routines, we can make immediate adjustments that enhance our students’ learning experiences and our teaching satisfaction. By adopting Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle you can navigate the various stages of your teaching experiences in real time. The cycle begins with Description, where you recount what happened in your classroom – the decisions, the interactions, the challenges, and the successes. Moving to Feelings, you explore your emotional responses and thoughts during these experiences. In Evaluation, you weigh what worked well and what didn't. Analysis leads you to a deeper understanding, where you make sense of these experiences. Then comes Conclusion, where the lessons learned and insights gained are crystallized. Finally, Action Plan sets the stage for future teaching, where you apply these insights to enhance your educational practice.

Navigating Through Student Feedback
Now as we reflect on the semester, understanding and effectively using student evaluations is crucial. Despite debates about their validity, they can offer valuable insights into our teaching methods when interpreted thoughtfully. Let's explore a few techniques to effectively get valuable information from these evaluations:

• Analyzing Feedback Patterns: Instead of focusing on isolated comments, examine trends and patterns in feedback across different courses and terms. This approach allows you to identify consistent issues needing attention or strengths to be leveraged. Understanding these patterns helps you make informed decisions about changes to your teaching practices that are responsive to the cumulative insights provided by your students.
• Beyond Student Rating: Review student evaluations holistically, by considering both qualitative and quantitative data together. This approach helps us understand the context and explanations behind the scores and comments, allowing us to address any discrepancies or conflicting perceptions.
• Bias in Student Evaluations: Be aware of potential biases (gender, ethnicity, age) that may influence student evaluations. These biases can skew perceptions and impact the fairness of evaluations.
• Collaborative Reflections: Engage with colleagues to share insights and strategies. This peer exchange can provide new perspectives and reinforce that you’re not alone in the quest for teaching excellence. It’s like sharing travel tips with fellow explorers to ensure everyone has a better journey.

Reach out to the Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) at [email protected], or schedule a consultation if you’d like to chat more about this topic!  And remember, growth often starts with small steps. You don't have to overhaul your entire teaching approach overnight. Start with small, manageable changes. 

Happy reflecting, and here’s to a restful and insightful summer break!