What are the most effective ways to incorporate reflective journals in teacher professional development?

Reflective journals can present a wide range of modalities, all of which can be beneficial to teaching and learning development. Often early career teachers face a range of frustrations, challenges and complexities. This opens them up to a wider range of challenges, which incorporates a need for critical reflection about professional practice, as well as performance. Encouraging teachers to write down their thoughts, feelings and emotions can be an important way to identify areas of professional development and encourage staff to begin to use new ways t approach challenges faced in the workplace. It ca also be good for promoting reflective practice that enables benefits for staff mental health.

Reflective journals must include divisiveness, dysfluency, and disconfirmation. Have a clear aim. Next, do ALL three of the following in an iterative fashion: 1. Develop a problem. Be unhappy and frame the problem so you understand the root causes and drivers. 2. Find the gap. Where are you and where do you want to go? Stratify your sample by extremes: Who succeeds and who doesn't. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer. 3. List alternatives. Question, debate, and evaluate many alternatives, including doing nothing, the opposite, and wild ideas. 4. Collaborative conflict: Look outside! Argue, debate, questions, & a premortem, or acting like everything that could go wrong has. Biggest mistake: Hastily replacing one decision with another.

Educators in all facets of education and in all stages of their careers can greatly benefit from reflective journaling. This is a strategy that I frequently recommend for all educators, but particularly for new teachers, teachers experiencing burnout, and those who are struggling in a particular area. The reason why is that journaling provides data and insight. Educators can point back to their reflections and track their progress and emotional journey. That can be a transformational tool for a struggling educator.

However the journal is designed, if it is a recommended or required practice by the school or district, time during the school day should be set aside for it by administration. If not, it will either fall to the wayside because teachers are overwhelmed and overworked, or it will lose all effectiveness because teachers will feel burdened by it.

Teachers are very busy people who require a lot of paperwork to drive their everyday practices. Adding additional steps into this can be problematic for teachers who lack time, and other other personal commitments. Therefore, finding ways to include reflective journalling in lesson plan templates or other mechanisms of reflection is really important. It can also be a useful way of encouraging reflective practice after encountering a key challenge or issue in the classroom. This is helpful as it encourages ways to think about professional practice and therefore grow as an educator.

It is important to be critical and reflective about your professional practice. To a certain extent, when training early career teachers it is understandable that they might be reluctant to talk openly about their vulnerabilities. This isn't easy, as it can be embarrassing to admit where we struggle, and more importantly why. It is important to build a safe culture where early career colleagues can use reflection of critical issues or challenges they face, identifying ways to build their problems and process in the future. Understanding these barriers and framing constructive solutions to them, through a process of experimentation, It is equally important to use these reflections to target and identify areas of professional support.

In my experience, few things we do as teachers are 100% effective or ineffective- the issue is identifying and exploring why something was effective for some and ineffective for others, or in what contexts a practice could be effective. Approaching reflection in this way has helped me better define the tools in my toolbox so I can later strategically choose which one is appropriate.

Reflection - A Mirror of Insight A journal is a reflection of things accomplished. Ideas that lay in waiting. Its purpose is as a Mirror of Insight on how you will modify your talents going forward. Like a mirror in fairy tales, a journal can reveal to you your true self. Experiences, thoughts and emotions are absorbed into the mirror only to guide you into a self discovery of your hidden strengths. It can be a discovery of weaknesses, and a reflection of valuable insights. Once viewed together, a pattern emerges into a unified work of art. Embrace your reflection, and allow it to guide your professional discovery. <Looking Back: Reflective Journaling For Training And Development Success By Paige Yousey>

We use the Toddle app for our collaborative planning. A very important section of the entire Unit of Inquiry planning is towards the end of the unit where there is a section devoted to 'Reflection'. It is interesting to see what worked or did not work for individual teachers in terms of teaching and learning engagements that they had planned. This reflection helps the team plan better after sharing and celebrating their individual experiences.

One way to encourage professional development is to support staff in engaging in reflective practice and promote their publishing of action research. A wide number of journals support the publishing of reflections and content related to experimental learning in the classroom. By normalising the sharing of teaching experience, including the more challenging components, it can encourage early career teachers to feel more confident if their insights about teaching and learning can help shape professional practices in other ways.