Reflective Practice in a College Language Class

Workshop Presentation
Liliana Torres-Goens  

A brief description of my thesis findings will be highlighted in order to give a general framework of reference to this approach. One of the main goals of this pedagogical instruction is to build venues of communication between the students and the professor for better understanding of the essence of learning. Also, intertwining relationships between “doing” and “thinking” will be exemplified and discussed. Attendees will actively participate in reflective activities I use in my classrooms so they can see the value and understand this pedagogical stance. The way this workshop will be conducted is as follows: In order to explain my philosophy, I will combine reflective activities with explanations of my pedagogical stance. As participants come into the room, I will ask them to complete an anonymous short survey on a piece of paper. I will start out with an ice-breaking exercise called: Connection is open...In this activity, participants are asked to sit in a circle and for 5 minutes, share aloud any thoughts that come to their mind. They can share anything related to their lives, work, the conference, or anything they want. Nobody is allowed to respond or make a comment about their classmates’ comments. We all listen and participate, if desired. I will explain the purpose of this activity and it will be the start point of my talk. Group Activity: Find somebody whose last name starts with the letter of yours. This is a debriefing activity. Participants voluntarily go to the blackboard and write the survey answers. I will probably divide the blackboard into 3 sections for each question. Nobody can talk while doing this and answers should be one word only. Then, in this specific case, the objective of the activity is to find out commonalities among the participants’ goals by attending this session. After everybody has written their answers, people walk around and look at the blackboard silently and identify that list. At the end, I will ask the participants to take a look at their initial survey answers and write a short self-assessment reflection about the “before and after” learning experience in the workshop. More examples will be given in the areas of after-quiz reflection, after-class reflection, syllabus elaboration, earning points negotiation, and end and beginning of the course reflections.