Recently I’ve been involved in mentoring teachers to prepare portfolios of evidence and a reflective account of their practice for the purposes of BALEAP TEAP Accreditation. I’ve also had a number of submitted portfolios to assess. One striking aspect of some of the Reflective Accounts of Professional Practice (RAPPs) is the tendency for teachers to describe and list their practice in general terms rather than explain and justify specific aspects of their practice. The following examples are compilations. Compare the first three with the fourth.
- Many students are reluctant to share ideas verbally, so I encourage them to use their microphones and turn on their cameras when responding to tasks (online).
- I try to get students to speak more by having them provide an answer to a task orally and then respond to other students with requests for clarification.
- I recommend online corpora to my students to understand how academic language is used and the role it plays in academic discourse.
- A few students in the class had previously struggled with the concept of finding significant points in articles they are reading. So I started the session with a reminder of what we mean by significant points in a line of argument. I then showed some examples of their own writing and asked them to highlight significant points.