Reflective Practice Works

NEW: ADDED 31 MAY 2012:

It's Saturday 31 March, and it is one week since I arrived back in Leamington Spa, following the IATEFL conference in Glasgow. I am also back at university, too, having just rushed through completion of my essay on 'reflective practice' and the use of 'co-operative development groups' in language teaching.    It has taken me less than 6 days from scratch to write it which, considering my terrible perfectionism, is pretty good going. I can submit now knowing I've done my best in what is probably the most personal academic piece of writing I have ever done.  It even comes with a tagline of 'the personal and the professional', and begins by quoting Adrian Underhill's 'Reflective Practice Blues' from the iatefl conference plenrary.

The notion of reflective practice is not for everyone, especially being part of a group which documents, by recording and then transcribing what is said.  Personally, I'm in favour, and have always been quite analytical and looking for opportunities to go over past experiences in work situations, in order to learn from them, using 'critical friends' if possible, as Tom Farrell puts it.

Having suffered from unexplainable anxiety attacks half way through this second term, it has been something which I was able to throw into the essay along with a CDG session in which I discussed this very topic back in October.  I have come out brighter, stronger and more able to understand what happens to me.  A CDG can help, as I have discovered, to deal with this.  And I have written about this, accordingly.  Hence my claim about it being my most personal piece of academic writing... certainly more so that my Second Language Acquisition essay on researching motivation, in which my voice needed to be heard more.

It was such a wonderful week in Glasgow... one of the best weeks of my life in terms of meeting new people and writers, teachers and other professionals who I had heard of (e.g. Nik Peachey, Tessa Woodward, Jeremy Harmer), read about (Adrian Underhill, Scott Thornbury) and studied books by (David Little, Leni Dam, Gavin Dudeney, Jim Scrivener) and admired (all of the above).  And some... like the #ELTchat Twitter group, which has opened me up to a 100+ language teachers to add to my growing Personal Learning Network.

I have also been involved in my first two online #ELTchat Twitter Group sessions, both last Wednesday.   I won't be a regular participant but it is certainly a useful to bash out some ideas in a fast-paced hour session.  It also is a great opportunity to use my newly established and rapidly growing Personal Learning Network, a topic which I presented on during my Professional Practice (ICT) class last recently. 

Last Friday, at the conference, I entered the Collins competition to solve a murder mystery, for which the answer was the 'Butler'.  To my great surprise, I won - £300 worth of Collins published books and materials.. which are currently being packed up in order to be despatched to Norfolk.  Due to poor timing, I eventually got round to opening the box on 31 May, over a month after it had been delivered and 2 months to the day of writing this post. See above video clip.

More from Glasgow:  Adrian Underhill and Jim Scrivener are interviewed and both mention the Demand-High ELT blog which they are currently jointly working on: