Looking forward, looking back

AS 2017 draws to its close, it is a sound practice to review the year. What went well, what didn’t? Were your aims met, did the students do well, and what could be done better? These are important and timely questions.

While a review can be a bit hit and miss, to build in reflection time over the year can be a helpful and informative process.

The end of the year is the ideal time to start and there are a few practical steps that could be taken to ensure next year is one of continual selfreflection and review.

A good place to start is to ask a colleague to be an observation buddy. This means that, say twice a term, your buddy watches you teach and discusses your work with you. Before this occurs, you develop a personal professional plan. The PPP is what you hope to achieve for the year.

This might be the introduction of mindfulness into the classroom; maybe initiate a flipped classroom experience; or perhaps organise a program of visiting speakers to your classes. The important thing is to have a plan.

Your buddy would review your progress and whether or not the plan is meeting its aims or not. This buddy role would be replicated with you observing a colleague and reviewing their plan with them.

The advantage of this is that your professional practice is being peer reviewed by someone of your choosing and the feedback is not linked to for- mal appraisal. It is essentially a co-operative monitoring role.

Over the course of a year this can provide information for a review and reflection process to be substantial.

This is for the single purpose of articulating the original aims as expressed in the PPP statement.

It is important to preserve flexibility. The PPP is to provide structure to the self-review process and not be rigid.

The plan is to give a broad process and the variables that can occur in a school day, let alone year, may have an impact on whether the aims can be reasonably met. This too is a learning experience.

Another way to make the review process of a year a worthwhile time is to keep a reflection diary. This can be electronic like a self-blog or diary. The point is that it is personal and essentially for your own development.

How this works can be through the keeping of a professional log. This is like a journal where you write an entry at regular intervals.

This has the advantage of you seeing how and why some lessons or topics were more successful than others.

It does not have to be a diary but regular notes in a lesson planner book. The point is to record observations.

These approaches are a good way to make the review process at the end of the year a time of constructive selfreflection and quality personal development, with the emphasis on the personal.

Another way is to have a colleague write a review of your professional practice after observing you over the year.

A further approach is to survey your students. This needs to be done anonymously so the students can feel free with what they say.

Any student response that does not treat this process with a level of seriousness can be discounted but the clarity of what students say can be revealing. They are, after all, the consumers of what is presented to them.

So as the year ends, perhaps it’s time to set up a process for 2018 where a personal review at the end of the year is not only informative but instructive. We can actually learn from ourselves. Christopher Bantick is a writer and teacher.