Join a Teaching Reflection Circle to Enhance Your Practices and Build Your Network
You probably know that taking time to reflect—as a person and as a teaching professional—is beneficial to your practice and also your overall wellbeing. Reflection is also crucial to growth: taking time to assess where we are and how our actions align with our values helps us chart new pathways and regain some of the joy and fulfillment that brought us to teaching in the first place.
But finding time to build a regular reflective practice, and sticking with it long enough to see the benefits, can be challenging.
Joining a Stearns Center Reflection Circle can provide you the time, accountability, and community to support your own reflective practice and gain insights from others at Mason. We will match interested faculty with a Circle of colleagues from across the university (usually 4-5), and help you arrange monthly meetings (60, 75, or 90 minutes, virtual or in-person). Using our reflection guides, each Circle meeting will include
- Time for introductions and conversation with your Circle
- 30 minutes of individual, private reflective writing about your teaching and related experiences, using our three-part structure
- Time for follow-up discussion based on insights and experiences that surfaced during the reflective writing
Across a semester of this practice, participants in similar programs across the nation recently noted that the repetition of the individual reflective practice, the shared reflective insights, and the connections to faculty colleagues across diverse backgrounds strengthened their growth and alignment as educators and helped anchor daily events in more meaningful values and relationships.
And you don’t need to light candles, chant, or compose poetic sentences to benefit from professional reflection! All members of the Mason community who are teaching at least one course during the term (i.e., faculty, graduate student instructors, administrators & staff with teaching assignments) are welcome to participate.
See additional information below. To indicate your interest, please complete our two-minute form. (See our Events Calendar for upcoming deadlines.)
Not sure yet if this option is a good fit? You can register for any of our upcoming drop-in information sessions, noted on the Teaching Squares page.
How Will I Benefit from Teaching Circle Participation?
As you participate, you can gain
- Opportunity to examine your values and practices through a repeated reflective writing framework that guides you to identify and explore key goals and experiences
- Connection and affirmation of your own experience, by understanding how other faculty at Mason, even those teaching in very different fields or modalities, have similar challenges and goals to yours
- Community support, by meeting and building networks with faculty from across disciplines
- Insight into your own approaches, by exploring your own values and gaining outside perspectives—on issues, events, and insights that are important to you
Remember that a Teaching Reflection Circle is a formative, private conversation: your reflective writing will remain private unless you choose to share from it, and Stearns Center will not require a report on your Circle’s work, or review any materials you share or post. This is not an evaluation of your teaching, and there are no wrong ways to step into reflective practice; this Circle offers you the chance to build some community and conversation about teaching. You may also find that your Teaching Circle colleagues can continue to provide feedback and support even after the Circle has completed its work.
What Does a Teaching Reflection Circle Do?
A Teaching Reflection Circle is built on reflective and reciprocal participation: Each member contributes from their own teaching experience, each member provides a sounding board to all the Circle members, and each member looks for ways to draw insights on how their experiences and observations can improve their own teaching practices.
In private reflective practice, you are responsible for creating the time for reflection, determining the trajectory of your writing or journaling, and drawing conclusions from your observations. In a collaborative Reflection Circle, you will
- Use the opening time (15-30 minutes) to connect with colleagues and learn about their recent/current teaching
- Take advantage of dedicated, scheduled reflection time that fits into your life: each 30-minute writing session is built into the scheduled meetings (in a video meeting, for instance, participants turn off their screens and microphones–and perhaps their other notifications!–and write in place until the time is finished)
- Explore your teaching by drawing on a core set of questions each week, developed by faculty-education researchers to help focus your attention on key values and experiences:
- What is the most important or pressing teaching work for you right now? How are you determining your priorities? What does this mean about your other work?
- Over the last two weeks, what have your feelings been about your teaching, your other work, your home and your wider context? How have you managed those feelings? How have they complemented or taken away from your other priorities?
- Considering your priorities and emotions, can you identify where you have agency as a teacher and where you lack agency? Which aspects of how your work is defined, implemented, or received are inside or outside of your control? In what ways do you see yourself as able to make a difference through your actions or through your work?
- Be supported by peer accountability to complete this sequence of reflections that can enable insight and growth
- Use the final minutes to receive immediate feedback on the most intriguing, challenging, or important realizations that surfaced during your reflection, and to listen actively as you place your experiences in context of other faculty experiences at Mason.
How Does Stearns Center Support Teaching Circles?
What Stearns Center does:
- Organize the initial Teaching Circle: Based on your survey responses and/or your participation in an informational meeting, Stearns Center assembles circles, contacts all the members, and confirms intent to participate.
- Provide guidelines: Brief guides will help your circle see options for how to open its meetings, explore teaching through written reflection, share insights and suggestions, and draw to a close.
- Provide schedule reminders and answer logistical questions: Short email updates will help you keep up your group’s momentum, and we’re available to help with the logistics of getting started and adapting to participants’ needs.
We ask that each Teaching Reflection Circle choose a convener who can help coordinate the group from the inside.
