Today I reread the first chapter of Doecke and Parr and was surprised that the notes I had made previously didn’t make the blog or the methodology chapter.
Points I will add are:
- Through writing teachers can explore their professional lives and “refine their understandings of the complexities of teaching and learning” (p. 9).
- “This is obviously of benefit to the students in their classes, although those benefits do not necessarily translate into tangible outcomes that can be easily measured” (p. 9).
- “… qualities that teachers value most in their students’ learning-intellectual curiosity, a willingness to engage in exploratory talk, imagination, a preparedness to collaborate while also accepting a degree of autonomy, a capacity to engage in metacognition and reflexivity-are the very same qualities that characterize their own professional learning. Teachers who engage in practitioner inquiry are much more likely to be able to generate a ‘culture of inquiry’ in their own classrooms” (Reid 2004, p. 12 as cited here p. 12).
- writing 3 fold: writing as artefact, writing as process, writing as medium – see p. 13. I can link the writing in my thesis to these concepts.
Doecke, B., & Parr, G. (2005). Writing: A common project. In B. Doecke, & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing = Learning (pp. 1-16). South Australia: Wakefield Press.
The points that you have highlighted from Doecke and Parr are absolutely correct. I also believe that there are certain benefits to be gained from writing about teaching, or indeed any job, as it encourages each individual to think about the processes they go through at work. Reflection and self-analysis are vital tools- for me, blogging about my teaching encourages me to analyse how I work.