Are you a teaching professional looking to reinvigorate your days of teaching? Has lesson planning turned into a stale routine? Do you feel the need to step back for a moment and take stock of what it is you do on a day-to-day basis?

Rediscover the joys of teaching with a new one-day professional development certificate course in reflective practice, offered by Brock’s Faculty of Humanities.

Certificate in Reflective Practice

Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Rodman Hall Arts Centre, 109 St. Paul Cres., St. Catharines,

$169 plus HST (includes lunch and refreshments)

To register: 905-688-5550 x5902; pdhumanities@brocku.ca

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Reflective practice helps teachers become aware of what they do and why they do it. But this is easier said than done: the inquiry goes much deeper than merely listing tasks performed on a regular basis and immediate, short-term goals to be reached.

Thomas S. C. Farrell

“Most people teach because they want their students to learn something,” says Thomas Farrell, professor of Applied Linguistics at Brock, who will lead the one-day session. “For example, how do they know their students are learning something? Reflective practice involves investigating all of this.”

A key tool in the process is reflective writing – a type of stream-of-consciousness journal writing in which behavioural and other patterns emerge.

“There’s a famous quote that sums up what reflective writing is: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?'” Farrell says. “In other words, when you see what you’ve written, then you can see what you’re thinking. You’re organizing your thoughts.”

Farrell, whose professional interests include reflective practice and language teacher education and development, recently published a new book, Reflective Writing for Language Teachers, this past September. His website is reflectiveinquiry.ca

Although geared primarily towards teachers, Farrell notes that reflective concepts and practices can apply to any profession.