Introduction
Brookfield believes in treating people as adults and employing the “’3 R’s, respect, research, (and) responsiveness.” He uses a four step process to summarize, analyze and reflect to re-energize teaching. This is designed to encourage students to reflect their teacher’s energy and connect with the lessons’ content. He feels the purpose of a critical reflection is to enlighten teaching and the point of view of the student, colleagues, literature in addition to our own viewpoint should all be employed. He terms these viewpoints as “lenses” and uses this term throughout his writing. .
Brookfield recognizes the different modalities, and encourages teachers to adapt their teaching modalities to accommodate them. This includes individual, group, visuals, and kinetic materials based upon the five senses. He advises discussion regarding these modalities so that students become more aware of how they learn. Along with this he suggest students participate in deciding based on their individual learning modality, which project and assignments will be most helpful to them in understanding the material. He also engages students in team teaching. Team teaching can be a very valuable tool since it requires the student to have a full grasp of the material, an understanding of how they learned it and an understanding of how another learns in order to teach their peers.
Brookfield’s basic assumption that good teaching equates to what helps students learn just makes good sense. I am sure that students, teachers and past theory will agree with me on this. . The next two that he emphasizes; that the best teachers are critically reflective; constantly examining their own assumptions in order to remain aware of how the students experience the learning process may raise debate among other teachers. . However, I am convinced that students will agree with me that when they are able to use their best learning style they can absorb material, deeper and more quickly than when they need to adapt to a teaching style alien to their way of understanding.
Critical Analysis
Brookfield insists upon student participation in the learning process. To draw students in and mandate participation he created a series of exercises. This range from anonymous forms to group exercises where everyone must address the group individually. The goal is to keep the students engaged in their learning process. . While the need to keep students engaged and actively learning, not all students and teachers agree with all, or indeed any of his methods. Personally, there are some activities that I favor over others as well.
Brookfield developed an anonymous questionnaire that he distributes at the end of the week and uses the responses to start the next week’s class. He asks his class to take five minutes to look at and answer five short questions about the week’s class. These questions are written in plain English and are about when they were most engaged and distanced, what was helpful, confusing or surprising. This regular review and reflection by student is important to build their critical analysis skills. The questionnaires and responses are anonymous. This is important to build a sense of trust between the student and teacher. He provides a copy for the student to take home, this also adds to the trust, as well as encouraging the student to reflect further on the week’s learning experience. By taking his personal time to bring the papers home over the weekend he shows his personal concern for his students. Starting the next class by reviewing the responses helps prevent future problems and misunderstandings. Brookfield closes by thanking his students and asking their help in making the class more responsive to the student’s concerns. . The full text of the questionnaire can be found in the attached Appendium A
The Learning Audit is a method that students can use to monitor their progress. It involves them look back at the end of each week and evaluating a range of accomplishments they achieved in the last week. These include various things they could not do, or did not know one week ago. Some of these items are; what can you do, what do you know, and what can you teach others. .
These class and self evaluations are an important part of his teaching method not only because they give the teacher advance warning as to what problems the students are facing so that the teacher can establish the appropriate grounds for action, but because they build trust as well. By providing appropriate materials and encouraging the students themselves to reflect on their learning process they begin to recognize the diverse methods in which learning opportunities present themselves. This also helps students develop their critical thinking and learn to apply those skills in every day settings. .The most successful evaluations are not just clear readily accessible exercises that give immediate results. They should also be geared towards the individual so that rather than creating a fear of failure they are affirming and educative so they encourage the students to take action in the future that will further enhance their education. .
Brookfield feels that verbal communication, getting the student to address the group and state an opinion, to be extremely important. He also acknowledges that some students are extremely uncomfortable with this. He addresses this in a variety of ways. In the beginning, he starts with setting ground rules based upon the teaching plan and the students’ input and observations. To begin with, he asks the students to write down their own notes about past successful and unsatisfactory experiences. They he instructs them to share these in a group setting and take turns in discussing them so everyone participates equally. The object is to establish the three best and three worst characteristics and decide how the best can be enhanced, and the worst avoided. The final part to this is for each group, and then the class to draft a charter that can be used publicly to guide future discussions. . Because these are the students’ own rules and observations they are more likely to adhere to them and respect them than if they were seemingly arbitrarily decided and enforced by the teacher alone. .
Because student discussion and participation is vital to his teaching method, and because this is most students frequently have not spent much, if any time critically analyzing this process it is one of the most prominent focuses in his lesson plans. To this end, he not only has students evaluate discussions based upon their personal past and present experiences, he also employs video clips to help students distance their own emotions from the situation and make clear judgments. Before watching the videos, the students are asked to look for participants who made the best and worst contributions and think of ways to improve the discussions they watched. . Watching others can often be a valuable learning tool because it depersonalizes the experience, but still gives to students the opportunity to personally relate to a character or presentation style and see how it come across to others. .
Debate, including a discussion of the issue before hand, a team approach to draft the debate arguments and a follow up reflection paper that each student writes afterwards is a helpful took to encourage participation in the discussion and critical thinking process. He suggests questions such as assumptions that were clarified, confirmed or unexpected? How could new assumptions be confirmed and what evidence would you need? What new perspectives suggested themselves and how was your thinking changed by the debate?
One of the methods he recommends for this is the “Hatful of Quotes.” This exercise is designed to make participation as stress free as possible for those students who are not comfortable addressing a group. This method employees putting multiple copies of 5 or 6 textual quotes in a hat and having the students take turns drawing out a quote and comment on it to the group. Everyone must participate, but the order is up to the students. In this way, the more confident students go first. Since there are a limited number of quotes, it is likely that the later students will draw something that already has been read and commented on so they have something to build upon. This not only makes for good participation in the immediate situation, it helps students build confidence for the future. . Not all students agree with this process especially those who, for one reason or another, are not comfortable verbally addressing a group. Fortunately, I am not one of those individuals who is extraordinarily insecure about speaking in public. Teachers are often also reluctant to insist that students who are not comfortable about speaking publicly do so. However, not to address the problem risks the very students who would avoid speaking out by not helping them overcome this in a supportive situation.
Conclusion
Brookfield’s own teaching plan includes many more activities and exercises that can be addressed here (See attached Addendum A). To this end, I attempted to select a variety of approaches that best exemplified his method and teaching plan. Essentially, my critical opinion is that his plan is based upon developing a student teacher relationship based on mutual respect and trust that extends into the group dynamics as well. In this other evaluations of his teaching style seem to concur. ,. This allows students to become fully intellectually engaged without being concerned about acceptance. By setting a firm frame work early on students know the ground rules and how to participate. By investigating their own learning style they understand their own educaional learning needs better. They also can see others as simply different, no better or worse because of it. When they interact with others they know that it is - to use an old homily - “not just what they say, it is how they say it.”
Bibliography
Brookfield, S. (2006). The Skillful Teacher. Retrieved 06 39, 2013, from Stephen Brookfield: http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/Dr._Stephen_D._Brookfield/Workshop_Materials_files/The_Skillful_Teacher.pdf
Hibbison, E. (2009 -2011). Critically Reflective Teaching. Retrieved 06 29, 2013, from Virginia Community College System: http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/mrcte/brookfield.htm
Tuinjman, A. (1995). Stephen Brookfield. In International Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
