Dispositional Tuning: Reflecting the Change

Presented by: Dr. Vandy Britton (Program Coordinator) & Jonathan Vervaet (Faculty Associate)

WestCAST 2014 – February 20th, 2014

What characteristics of mind / thought are most

valuable in effective teachers?

Four Guiding Dipositions of Professional Programs

at Simon Fraser University (Smith, 2004)

Pedagogical Sensitivity – understanding the primacy of the adult/child

relationship, its ethical underpinnings, and its institutional forms.

Other Directedness – understanding the community basis to

learning, the service orientation to teaching, and the requisite openness

to diversity, difference, or otherness in education.

Reflective Capacity – understanding the ways and means of grasping the significance of teaching situations and events.

Critical Mindedness – understanding the problematic nature of teaching practice.

Pedagogical Sensitivity Other Directedness Reflective Capacity

Critical Mindedness

Student Teacher Admissions&

Hiring Faculty Associates

Multiple Perspectives:

A Reflection on Experiences in the

Professional Development Program

Interwoven Experiences

Student Teachers & Faculty Associates

Personal Reflection and Reflexivity

Learning about, learning with, learning from.

Cognitive Dissonance: Disrupting the Integrity of Taken for Granted Assumptions.

The Ripple Effect of Helping New Teachers Become Proficient in the Dispositions

…in terms of the orientation of the PDP, "[r]eflection is seen as central...being viewed not as a

generic disposition but as a primary organizing principle in

the program's renewal.”

Peter Grimmett (1995) "Inquiring into teacher education" in Collaborative research in teacher education: the SFU

experience (pg. 165)

Developing the Critically Reflective Capacity in the Maple Ridge /

Mission Module

The habit of critical reflection is crucial for teacher’s survival.

- Stephen Brookfield (1995)

Research QuestionHow will modeling critical mindedness and critical reflection lead me to a deeper awareness of my own educational assumptions, and support beginning teachers in making connections between a critical examination of theoretically informed, evidence based teaching practices and their own pedagogical understandings and emerging teaching paradigms?

A critical self

awareness of our

pedagogical

assumptions…

Critical reflection compels us to bring our previous experiences to the uncovering of new

truths.

What lies below the surface, effects the

surface.

Personal Reflection

and Reflexivity by All Members

of the PDP Community

Recursive Nature of Inquiry and

Critical Reflection

"Already we are disposed towards inquiry. It is all about cultivating mindfulness in the

work we do. Certainly there is no point promoting a form of inquiry that merely

places additional demands upon people's time and commitment; rather our intention

should be to press beyond a reflective agenda that adds to the busywork of teachers and to encourage a bodily

reflection that strives to articulate the meanings of the practices in which we are engaged, and in that articulation, further

inform those practices.”

- Stephen Smith Bearing of Inquiry...

“(t)hrough the development of the critical reflective capacity student

teachers will be able to clearly articulate their teaching philosophies

and begin to understand how an informed examination of practice can, and should be, a normative condition

of teaching.”

- Jonathan Vervaet

…in the face of educational change

me.

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We learn by going where we have to go.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Through a continuing reconstruction of self through a variety of experiences with our medium and ourselves, we can come to understand ourselves,

our motivations.

I was with it down there… but I just couldn’t see

it.

“For the moment when something collapses it is intensely disappointing… each time, though, I got to know the stone a little more. It got higher each time. So it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone… and that is one of the things my art is trying to do. I obviously don’t understand it well enough… yet.”

- Andy Goldsworthy

Failure, reiteration, recursion are all fundamentally

important to my work as Faculty

Associate as they are to my research and my discovery

of self.

Just as a performer receives feedback from the audience, the reactions of those I am in performance with provide me

feedback about how I am defining and performing my role as teacher, as a person.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals who can go it alone.

- M. Wheatley

Reflection in and of itself is not enough; it

must always be linked to how the world can be changed” (Brookfield,

1995)

Be the change

you want to

see in the world.

- Mahatma Gandhi

How might reflecting on the dispositions, and

using them as springboards to critically

examine our own practices as educators,

develop our actual capacity in them as

educators and human beings?

How do we begin to define or shape our personal and

professional identities through contemplating

these dispositions?

In what ways do these dispositions play a role in how one defines what it

means to ‘be teacher?’

Choose one of the dispositions that you connect with on a personal or

professional level.

Reflect on how this disposition might impact your personal or professional

identity.

Pedagogical Sensitivity Other Directedness Reflective Capacity

Critical Mindedness

Ticket Out the Door: An idea I want to inquire into /

reflect on further is…