Reflective Practice

The Postgraduate Certificate programme is based on the belief that good academic practice, including teaching, can be achieved, not only by improving teaching skills, but also by increasing awareness of your own practice and awareness of your students' experiences of learning.

The programme team believes that one of the most productive ways to develop effective teaching and learning strategies is for you to reflect critically on your own approaches. However, reflection alone is insufficient for professional development to occur. To prevent reflection from simply becoming self indulgent ‘navel-gazing’, it needs to involve engagement with developing your academic and teaching practice proactively. 

It needs to involve a conscious thinking about your own thinking and how you see the world. It might involve you reflecting on the way you see things, perhaps by comparison to the ways others see things, and thinking about how you understand things and how you have influence on what you do and have capacity to change, to develop and to learn from your own experiences and practices. 

Change should follow any period of reflection on your practice and needs also to include evaluation of the impact of such change. Through reflective practice, action and evaluation, we are confident you can create an improved academic environment appropriate to your own discipline context.

Our aim is to help you to develop a self critical, reflective and problem solving approach to your teaching or support of learning role, whereby you will seek to improve your practice, improve your understanding of your practice and the improvement of the context within which your practice takes place.