The Skillful Teacher

Assumption 2: Skillful Teachers Adopt a Critically
Reflective Stance Towards Their Practice
I have devoted a whole book, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher
(Brookfield, 1995), to fleshing out this second assumption, so if you
are really intrigued by this idea you can consult that resource. The
point of the first assumption we have just discussed, indeed the point
of teaching generally, is to help students learn. Doing this well means
we have to take informed pedagogic actions. However, many of our
actions are uninformed in that they involve us teaching in certain
ways simply because we have been told we ought to. Uninformed
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teaching happens when we simply mimic whatever teaching behav-
iors we endured as students (I suffered through it so now it’s your
turn!). When our teaching is determined by an unthinking sub-
scription to professional norms, or an uncritical mimicking of the
behaviors of teachers we encountered in our own lives, our chances
of helping our own students learn are severely reduced. We are like
scatterguns spraying pedagogic pellets in the hope that some of them
actually hit the target (the students). Skillful teaching, on the other
hand, is teaching that is contextually informed. And one of the best
ways of ensuring that our teaching is so informed is to integrate the
critically reflective habit into our practice.
At this point I need to define my terms a little more. What do I
mean by informed actions? And exactly what is critical reflection?
By informed actions I mean actions that are based on assumptions
that have been carefully and critically investigated. An informed
teaching action meets three conditions. First, it can be explained
and justified to ourselves and others. If a student or colleague asks
us why we’re doing something, we can show how our action springs
from certain assumptions we hold about teaching and learning. 
Second, it is researched. The rationale we provide for informed
actions is grounded in our scrutinized experiences. We can lay out
the evidence (experiential as well as theoretical) for our choices
and make a convincing case for their accuracy. As we shall see in
Chapter Four, a teacher’s ability to provide a convincing rationale
for her practice is one of the most important indicators students take
into account when judging a teachers’ credibility.
Thirdly, an informed action is one that has a good chance of
achieving the consequences it intends, precisely because it has been
researched. An informed action is an action taken against a back-
drop of inquiry into how students perceive what we say and do. As
teachers we make decisions and choices on the assumption that
these will be understood in the way we intend. Frequently, however,
students and colleagues read meanings into our actions that are very
different from, and sometimes directly antithetical to, those we
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intend. In cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s (1991) terms, the mean-
ings a teacher encodes in a teaching action are quite separate from
those interpreted or decoded by the learner. This is why it is so
important to try and view our actions from as many different 
perspectives as possible. When we can see our practice through
others’ eyes, we are in a much better position to speak and behave
in ways that are perceived in the ways we want them to be. This
increases the likelihood that our actions have the effects we want;
in other words, that they are informed.
Now, what do I mean by critical reflection? Critical reflection is
the process by which we research the assumptions informing our
practice by viewing these through four complementary lenses—the
lenses of students’ eyes, colleagues’ perceptions, literature, and our
own autobiography. We can access the first lens of students’ eyes
through various classroom research techniques (Anderson, 2002;
Angelo, 1998; Brookhart, 2000; Butler and McMunn, 2006) that
help us get inside students’ heads and see the classroom as they do.
Colleagues’ perceptions (the second lens) are available to us when
we team teach with colleagues who debrief the class with us (Bess
and Associates, 2000; Buckley, 2000; Eisen and Tisdell, 2000), when
we invite a colleague in to our class to observe and comment on
what they see happening, and when we join faculty reflection and
conversation groups to talk about common teaching dilemmas
(Connelly and Clandinin, 1988; Frase and Conley, 1994; Miller,
1990). The third lens entails reading educational literature—from
stories and narratives of teaching (Preskill and Jacobvitz, 2000) to
theoretical analyses (Freire, 1993)—in the hope that this will sug-
gest new interpretations of familiar dilemmas. Finally, we can review
our personal autobiographies as learners so that we can make 
visceral connections to, and gain a better understanding of, the
pleasures and terrors our own students are experiencing.
Why is a critically reflective stance central to skillful teaching?
First, as I have already argued, viewing our classroom choices and
decisions through the four lenses of critical reflection increases the
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chances that our actions will be based on assumptions that are accu-
rate and valid. Actions taken on the basis of such assumptions are,
by definition, informed. Second, when we act in critically reflective
ways, we model critical thinking in front of our students. By show-
ing learners how we are constantly trying to unearth and research our
assumptions, we demonstrate the very skills and dispositions we are
asking our students to engage with. Thinking critically is something
that many teachers urge on students without providing much scaf-
folding for this process. When we show students how we apply criti-
cal thinking to our own teaching, and when we name for them that
this is what we’re doing, we also earn the moral right to ask them to
engage in the same process. So not only does modeling critical think-
ing provide a public example of what this looks like, it also underscores
our expectation that students will take the process seriously.
Third, a critically reflective stance can also reenergize our teach-
ing. One of the problems many of us face as the years pass by is that
our teaching can become stale. As we travel further and further
from our first tension-filled days in class, and as we become more
confident in our content knowledge and our ability to anticipate
students’ questions or reactions, it is easy to relax to the point where
predictability and even boredom take over. Semesters come and go,
we get older, gain promotion and sometimes tenure. In such cir-
cumstances we risk going on automatic pilot—teaching the same
content, using the same proven exercises, assigning the same texts,
and setting the same assignments. A certain emotional flatness sets
in, followed by a disinterest in the dynamics of our practice.
When we practice critical reflection, this staleness quickly dissi-
pates. We discover that things are happening in our classes we had
no awareness of. Actions that we thought were transparent and
unequivocal are perceived in multiple and sometimes contradictory
ways by students and colleagues alike. Books give us new “takes” on
familiar dilemmas that we thought were impenetrable, colleagues
offer ways of dealing with problems we had not thought of before,
and students constantly surprise us with their privately felt (but not
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publicly voiced) reactions to our practice. Teaching in a critically
reflective key is teaching that keeps us awake and alert. It is mind-
ful teaching practiced with an awareness that things are rarely what
they seem. For faculty in mid- or late career, introducing the criti-
cally reflective habit into their lives can make the difference
between marking time till retirement and a genuine engagement in
the classroom.