Reflective practice

As an academic my aim is to be a good teacher. We can continuously improve through past experience. We gain experience that comes in useful in further improving the knowledge on ‘what to teach’ and ‘how it is taught’. We could realize our strengths and weaknesses through various events such as self-evaluation, peer evaluation and reflecting on our own mistakes. These continuous improvements in learning can be explained by the Kolb learning cycle, which involves four stages.






See the link
http://homepage.mac.com/dov_rosenberg/images/kolb.gif
for Figure Kolb’s Learning Cycle
Source-Kolb(1984)

The cycle Kolb has shown that a person should experience on the concrete situation first and then should reflect on the said experience. Thirdly, he/she should think and plan necessary changes and that abstract plan should be experimented at the final stage.
Head of the department assigned me a task to develop a new course on “Certificate in Retail Management” course which had to be started as soon as possible. For that I had to draft a memo to get a faculty board approval. According to the Kolb’s cycle, I had to think about the current situation first.
At the same time I asked the help for one of my senior lecturers because in the past he was always opposing and try to stop this kind of new courses. So by using my past experience (making sense of the experience) I realized if I could get the help of him he would think that he is also a part of this team work. According to the reflective cycle my next step was to plan what to do. Thus I planed to study this course and I planed to search Sri Lankan as well as international courses on Retail Management. Then I plan to visit few experts in the industry too. I prepared a small time table and within one month I drafted a memo on that.