Model of reflection: The TEE Framework

My name is Michelle Eady I'm an associate professor in the School of Education and I teach in curriculum and pedagogy in the primary education degree. This degree can have anywhere between 150 and 230 students and I've been teaching into these subjects for the past 13 years.

The reason I embed reflection into my subject is because as teachers, reflection is a big part of what we do. And so we call this being a reflective practitioner. So reflecting back on a lesson that we've taught. Learning something from that reflection and then taking that information and that knowledge and implementing it moving forward. Growing out of what the students had shown us about what they knew about reflection came an idea that maybe there are some specific areas that we needed to foster the students towards in order to be good at critical reflection. And those three things that came out ended up being a bit of a model that we call the TEE model.

So the T stands for theory. And when we talk about theory, we're talking about the literature that's out there about what they're reflecting on. Then one of the Es is about the expectations. So the expectation of the degree of the outcomes of your degree. So in this case with teachers, it's about the professional teaching standards for teachers and the expectations that they're going to reach them by the time they go into schools. And then the final E is about experience, and it's being able to take an experience that the student has and relate it back to the theory and the expectation. So an example of this would be around asking the students what they thought a quality teacher was. And I have them think about the teachers that they've had in the past and what makes those teachers quality teachers. And they take a look at maybe one area that they think is really important for a quality teacher and they find literature around that topic and to write and to support the point that they're making about the importance of that aspect of teaching. Then they go to the professional teaching standards and they find the professional teaching standard that relates to having that quality as a really good teacher. And that's what we call the T and the E, And that's a first part of the assessment task. Then they go out into schools and they spend time in classrooms with quality teachers, and now they've had an experience. And maybe that changes their mind about what they wrote about and they want to take it a different route. Or maybe what they saw in the classroom was exactly what they wrote about. And so they find some more literature to support that. But now we have a really good critical reflection because they've taken the theory, they've taken the expectation and now an experience of that, and they've written about those three things in combination.

Often when I think about my job and my role at the university, I describe it as I teach teachers how to teach. And a big part of that for me is ensuring that teachers can reflect on what they're learning, how they are learning, and how they're moving forward in the professional teaching standards to get to where they want to be so that they're really great teachers. And I take responsibility for that as part of my role to make sure that they understand and can learn how to take the time to do a proper reflection of what they're learning and how to move those things and those bits of knowledge forward into their next practice.

Thinking about our roles as educators in the higher education system, it's really part of what we do is to help students think about their own learning journeys and where they're moving forward from here. So my advice would be to take time to teach how to reflect.

Students need to be fostered, they need to be supported and scaffolded how to do this so that they can learn how to do it properly and to stress the importance of taking time to do it. I think in today's world we're all so busy and we're all moving forward so quickly and to reflect actually take some time to think about that. But it's well worth the time because by the end of the degree you have students coming back to you and saying, Wow, I'm looking back at everything that we've done through the course of this degree, and I can see how far I've come. I can see the direction that I'm going to make in the future, and I can see how I'm going to scaffold my students to be able to reflect on their own work and their own growing and learning that it's really important.