Stephen D. Brookfield’s book Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, is a useful text for professionals within the education field at all levels and within a multitude of capacities. The text critically examines the role of a teacher in modern contexts and how one can effectively integrate pedagogical tools to improve one’s practice. Brookfield’s work provides a framework for teaching professionals to question their own assumptions as practitioners. This essential guide, provides tools to counter complacency and bolster reflection to ensure a flexible approach to teaching.
Furthermore, Brookfield provides creative and integrated ways to involve students in providing consistent feedback for teachers to improve their pedagogy. Although I support most of his proposed tools, at times, the methods he presents can seem unrealistic to implement. Overall, this text is extremely useful for professionals in higher education, however, many of the tools that are presented by Brookfield need to be adapted to work in more realistic settings especially within higher education.
As presented by Brookfield, the role of a teacher is often one that originates from inherent biases within the education system. Furthermore, in academic settings, teaching professionals are discouraged to admit to their failures. The combination of these two detriments to the teaching profession can often create educational systems that are inflexible to improvement. This is a central critique on the education system that Brookfield deconstructs.
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In fact, he argues that in order to combat this structural failure, it is critical to create environments among teaching colleagues as a tool to address shared experiences and struggles within their practice. Brookfield describes these as “faculty learning communities”, which are support groups to “explore a shared problem- provide another avenue of collegial feedback” (67). These groups have been used to address a range of classroom issues including social issues faced by teachers as well as achieving curriculum based objectives. Brookfield suggests that teachers from different academic backgrounds form these communities rather than those from the same discipline. His argument being that multidisciplinary groups can help professionals discover new ways to think rather than discipline-specific ones (68).
Although I acknowledge the importance of this strategy, from an implementation standpoint this seems to be quite difficult at a large institution, such as Berkeley. Thus, a more practical approach to these learning communities is to facilitate these community groups within various departments. Moreover, at the higher education level, many of the problems that professionals face are extremely niche-specific to their discipline. Therefore, at times, it may be more useful for these groups to consist of professionals within the same or similar fields. Overall, this strategy proposed by Brookfield is an extremely important one that can help incentivize continuous improvement as educators, thus creating an educational system that reinforces the fluidity of teaching as a profession.
Brookfield discusses self-reflection within the context of teaching as a bottom-up approach starting with giving agency to one’s students. A critical tool that Brookfield introduces is the Critical Incident Questionnaire, which aims to seek feedback from students at the end of each lecture or discussion (85). These surveys are used by students to help identify what they after the lecture. These assessments can be used in a range of different ways, primarily they can be used to help educators understand conceptual holes that might be confusing their students by seeing how students view concepts through their eyes.
Furthermore, it can help provide useful information on various methods of teaching that are working and those that need to be rethought. Brookfield proposes to implement this tool at the end of each week’s lecture. He suggests the survey consist of questions including “At what moment in class this week did you feel most engaged with what was happening?”, “At what moment in class were you feeling most distanced from what was happening?” and “What about the class this week surprised you?” (108).
These questions encourage a more personalized approach to learning and teaching that can often be undervalued. There is considerable benefit to implementing these efforts, however, the frequency at which they are suggested seem to be impractical within the context of modern time constraints in classrooms. In higher education learning environments, it does not seem feasible to implement these surveys every week within the time frame allotted for lectures and discussions. Given the time-pressed circumstances that exist within the classroom, it seems as though this requirement should be implemented outside of lecture and discussion time.
Furthermore, weekly questionnaires might be considered redundant and laborious within higher education contexts. Therefore, this tool should be rethought within differing learning environments. For example, it can be a monthly assessment that is given to students rather than every week. Overall, this method is useful in providing feedback to educators throughout the course rather than solely at the end of the semester. This tool is a critical implementation for teaching professionals to be provided with the opportunity to change and improve their teaching while the semester is still in progress. Thus, the overall concept should be refined to work within different learning environments.
Brookfield’s proposed tools are somewhat ambitious within a higher education environment. He proposes insightful ways to integrate self-reflection into academia, however, the ways of implementation are quite unrealistic given the logistics of real-life classroom situations. To get the most effective information from various tools that he presents, it is critical to strategically place them within the course of the semester. Therefore, these tools should not be discarded, but rather adapted within the higher education system.
Brookfield’s Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher is a useful text to challenge teaching professionals to engage in a dynamic pedagogical framework as educators. His central theme focuses on ways to reflect as a teacher to improve one’s methods and approach to problem-solving various issues that arise in the classroom environment. As someone who has not yet been a GSI, I found this text useful in preparing me to approach leading discussion sections in the future.
Furthermore, I have discovered many tools that will help shape self-reflection to improve my teaching methodologies. I found his recommendation of keeping a regular “learning journal” to keep notes of various insights and practices that are used by professors to be extremely useful (157). By keeping a record of various experiences throughout one’s own education, it can greatly inform one’s own practice. Overall, I have found Brookfield’s work extremely insightful by providing tools to implement self-reflective practices as an aspiring educator in higher education.
