Reflective Teaching in Schools

by Professor Andrew Pollard, Kristine Black-Hawkins, Gabrielle Cliff Hodges

Building on best-selling texts over three decades, this thoroughly revised new edition is essential reading for both primary and secondary school teachers in training and in practice, supporting both initial school-based training and extended career-long professionalism. Considering a wide range of professionally relevant topics, "Reflective Teaching in Schools" presents key issues and research insights, suggests activities for classroom enquiry and offers guidance on key readings.Uniquely, two levels of support are offered: practical, evidence-based guidance on key classroom issues including relationships, behaviour, curriculum planning, teaching strategies and assessment processes; routes to deeper forms of expertise, including evidence-informed 'principles' and 'concepts' to support in-depth understanding of teacher expertise. Andrew Pollard, former Director of the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme, led development of the book, with support from primary and secondary specialists from the University of Cambridge, UK."Reflective Teaching in Schools "is part of a fully integrated set of resources for primary and secondary education. "Readings for Reflective Teaching in Schools "directly complements and extends the chapters in this book. Providing a compact and portable library, it is particularly helpful in school-based teacher education.The website, " reflectiveteaching.co.uk," offers supplementary resources including reflective activities, research briefings, advice on further reading and additional chapters. It also features a glossary, links to useful websites, and a conceptual framework for deepening expertise. This book is one of the Reflective Teaching Series inspiring education through innovation in early years, schools, further, higher and adult education."

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction

544 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 8, 2008

Reviews

[Sabeena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know and be *doing* as a reflective practitioner. It is written with evidence-based strategy in mind so it also provides links to key research around particular themes, whilst also offering helpful examples for lines of enquiry you could realistically follow. This has been the main difference between this book and others which only tell you what you ought to be doing but offer no guidance with respect to how that should look in practice particularly if you are at the ITE, probationary, or NQT stages.
The book also covers the English, Scottish and Welsh contexts for ease of reference, which is useful no matter what context applies to you, so you can see how things compare across the board.
It is a huge book, with over 600 pages so it is more of a companion text than a one-time read. You would do well to own a copy and use it to refer back to trusting that all the major themes you need to be well-versed in are contained in the book from curriculum planning to assessment through to professional development as a newly qualified teacher.
Overall I felt the advice is sound and clearly from curriculum experts in the area. Coverage of peripheral areas and aspects too is skilfully achieved considering sometimes it can be hard to weave philosophy authentically into accounts of practical classroom management.
My only bug would be regarding the formatting of the physical book; it is very difficult to read the extremely small and tightly-packed text. If the *layout* (not organisation) is given more thought this could improve, for example by spacing out and increasing the font size to make it more hard copy reader-friendly.

[Steve Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps of most use to student teachers or probationary teachers.