Teaching Triangles:

UML Reflective Teaching Pilot Orientation

October 8, 2021

Justin Fuhr - Liaison Librarian
Sarah Clark - Learning & Instruction Support Librarian
Kyle Feenstra - Coordinator, Learning & Instruction Support

​Orientation to the Teaching Triangles Reflective Teaching Pilot
 

• Defecit thinking vs strengths-based approaches to education
• Critical learning communities
• Overview of the reflective teaching pilot process

Deficit Model in Education

"Students in school districts experiencing higher poverty rates achieve lower grades".

 

Deficit thinking assumes:

• Communities experience poverty because they lack the ability or resilience to improve their own economic status. 
• Students are less successful because they lack the ability or resilience to perform better at school. 

Deficit thinking blames the individual or community rather than acknowledging how structural barriers impose systematic oppression and inequality.

The assumption that failure to meet specific standards results from intellectual, physical, or cultural deficiency.
 

Deficit thinking blames the individual or community rather than acknowledging how structural barriers impose systematic oppression and inequality.

"Students failed because they:

• didn't study hard enough,
• lack the aptitude, intelligence, or physical ability to perform well enough,
• are not suited to academics". 

"Teachers:

• failed to prepare students to meet testing standards". 

 

These explanations provide little insight into the complex teaching and learning experiences of students and instructors. 

Strengths-Based Education

• Identifies, affirms and builds on the individual strengths and successes of students and teachers.
   
• Aims to build curriculum and learning experiences that:
  • Offer students choice of activities and assessment.
  • Identify and achieve personal goals.
• Recognizes the importance of supportive networks and peer-relationships and is concerned with well-being.

Criticism of Strengths-Based Approaches

 

• Has been adopted as the pedagogy of neo-liberal individualism where value and success are based on performance.
   
  • Over emphasis on performance decontextualizes teachers and learners and disregards the impact of institutional politics and culture.
     
  • Emphasis on performance and outcomes encourages competitive behaviour. 

Do this...

1. Reflect on your personal teaching history, including all the intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional factors that have have impacted your work.
2. Identify and affirm your strengths and the strengths of your colleagues.
3. Consider how you can plan instruction in a way that utilizes personal strengths, with the intent providing students with self-affirming social learning experiences.
4. Consider how various environmental factors affect learning outcomes.
5. Help your colleagues reflect on their professional growth and establish goals for future development as an instructor. 

Avoid this...

1. Focusing your reflection and feedback on "what went wrong". 
2. Attributing negative outcomes to perceived deficiencies or undesirable behaviour. 
3. Over-emphasizing the performance of the instructor or students. 

Deficit thinking vs. Critical inquiry

 

Critical thinking is the deconstruction of conflict and contradiction,

whereas deficit thinking relies on oversimplification.

In education "things often don't go as planned" but this is not necessarily failure.
 

• Failure to achieve the desired outcomes often result from a misalignment between the institutional practices and the situated reality of the student and their past experiences.
   
• Unintended outcomes do not mean 'nothing' has been learned or what has been learned is not valuable. 
• Learning processes can take diverse paths and students should be affirmed for finding their own creative solutions. 
• Conflicts
  • are an important part of the learning process.
  • present new opportunities for creativity.
  • reveal systematic barriers to learning. 

Learning Communities & Reflective Practice

Personal history and learner history

• How has your your past experience as a student and teacher shaped your teaching methods?
• Who are your students? How have their past experiences affected their expectations and approaches to learning? 

 

Pedagogy

• What have you learned about how student's learn?
• How does your educational philosophy influence teaching methods, your relationships with students, your assessment processes? 
• Which educational philosophers/thinkers/researchers have influenced you as a teacher and why? 

 

Collective inquiry & dialogue

• What aspects of teaching and learning interest you as a group?
• What plans do you have to learn more about your teaching interests and explore these topics with colleagues? 

 

Mutually supported creativity

• How can you incorporate your pedagogy and teaching interests into classroom experiences that will support student engagement and creativity? 
• How can you and your colleagues explore and support each other in developing creative classroom experiences?

Overview of reflective teaching pilot process.

[Click the image to download the workbook.]

• Gray, M. (2011). Back to Basics: A Critique of the Strengths Perspective in Social Work. Families in Society, 92(1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1606/1044-3894.4054
• Lopez, S. J., & Louis, M. C. (2009). The Principles of Strengths-Based Education. Journal of College and Character, 10(4), 3–. https://doi.org/10.2202/1940-1639.1041
• Samaras, A. P. (2011). Self-study teacher research improving your practice through collaborative inquiry . SAGE.
• Samaras A.P., Adams-Legge M., Breslin D., Mittapalli K., O'Looney J.M., Wilcox D.R. (2008) Collective Creativity: A Learning Community of Self-Study Scholars. In: Samaras A.P., Freese A.R., Kosnik C., Beck C. (eds) Learning Communities In Practice. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi-org.uml.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8788-2_10

 

 

 

* Thanks to Justin Fuhr and Sarah Clark for their work leading this pilot.

References