Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher

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Targeting faculty at all levels and across disciplines, this personal guide explores how practicing critical reflection can help align faculty with desired student outcomes, to view their practice from new perspectives, and engage learners by using varied teaching formats. This is the second Brookfield book that I have read, after starting with his revised edition of The Skillful Teacher (2015). Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education, he is the author of numerous books on teaching, including The Skillful Teacher (2015), Teaching for Critical Thinking (2011), and The Discussion Book (with Stephen Preskill) (2016), all from Jossey-Bass.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Most appealing is Brookfield's openness to how the various techniques may be individually tailored by educators to fit unique situations. Chapter 3 establishes the importance for critical reflection of teachers analyzing their own autobiographies as learners.

All chapters have been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect today's classroom formats, whether online or face-to-face, or in large lectures or small groups.One particular dimension of this book that has served me well as a teacher is the Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ).

Having someone who conveys such similar challenges as my own was quite helpful, both in terms of knowing that my concerns are common, but also by providing practical ways to reflect in different ways and take actions to develop my teaching even further. Despite the continuity of the core thesis in the second edition, Brookfield has done something rather unusual for a new edition in completely rewriting “the whole book from the opening sentence to the last” (ix).

Filled with illustrative examples from a wide variety of classroom settings, the volume explores in detail what critical reflection is and why it is so vital for becoming a skillful teacher. Chapter 1 lays out the concept of reflection in general terms and then focuses on explaining what is distinctive about critical reflection.