Task 2C Reflective Theory

This task has been very profound and I've spent a lot of time preparing. I've benefited greatly from doing so, and now I have a lot more understanding on Reflective Practice.

Firstly I like how Donald Schön describes Reflective Practice as; "..a dialogue of thinking and doing through which I become more skillful" (Schön, 1983 The Reflective Practitioner, p31). It narrates remarkably how I think and see reflection as in distinction to my uses of reflective practice in my work. I have many times watched videos of myself dancing and singing, and have been really struck on how awful parts of my voice sounded and have been extra critical on my dance technique and performance, hence, I go on to making myself look and sound better, improving on everything that I've seen and heard. I then video myself again, and go on to noticing different things that I weren't so aware of before, therefore rising the fact that I've fixed the parts that I noticed originally. My 'doing' and 'thinking'; reflecting back with a visual tool, has made me become more skillful in my dance technique, singing technique, performance and constructive critical thinking. In my possible future career in classroom teaching I will have to use 'Lesson planning'. This will be a tool for reflective practice. I believe that keeping a journal will be incredibly useful for any type of teaching, including my teaching position now, which I am now getting into.

Being a beginner in teaching, reflective practice is very necessary to building up my skills through mistakes and successes: "The successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another and support one another...each phase is a step from something to something.." (John Dewey, What is thought? 1910) Dewey sees reflective thought as a stream or flow. This applies to all of my reflective thinking and practice in my career. I experience a mistake; I correct it. I experience a success; I build on it. I build onto the success too far of which turns into a mistake; I correct it. I see a mistake; I correct it. It goes on and on. "Until the artist is satisfied in perception with what he is doing, he continues shaping and reshaping" (Dewey, Art as experience, 1934 p51) I cannot rest until I get my performance right, my singing right, my dancing technique up to standards or my skills in being a successful teacher.
"..Do something, think about what you did, come to conclusions about what you did and plan to try again." (Kolb, 1984) Referring to this, David Kolb came up with; Kolb's learning cycle.

I always enter the cycle at Doing/Having an experience. The learning cycle is what I use as kind of a template in my journal. It's become integrated in my mind now and I no longer need to look at it as my guide, although I have it there just in case my mind goes astray. The cycle will be a very constructive tool to refer to in my career in teaching. With lesson planning, I can use Kolb's cycle to be at my aide, and it will also be useful in my thoughts and actions during teaching which will be a form of reflection-in-action introduced by Schön in 1987. (refer to Reader 2, p7) Even in my performing, Kolb's learning cycle has been existent; when I worked in Israel, I had to perform in a very long skirt, and during the first lot of performances it would always make me trip up. I knew that I had to do something about it, so I firstly reflected on in, concluded from it and planned out what I'd learned or thought of doing. Therefore the result was me grabbing my skirt at certain points in the dance of which I remember my skirt being the most troublesome, and it worked well. I also added to this by tightening the skirt around my waist so that it wouldn't decline downwards so much. It is incredible how Kolb has made sense of a lot of things when it comes to learning. I've always just use the phrase 'you learn from your mistakes'. Well now I can use 'you learn from your mistakes and successes'. This knowledge has always been there subconsciously, somewhat, but it's become a fully conscious matter in my mind.

As a dance and music teacher I have had to use many tools, such as Cubase to cut and crop music and Itunes and Youtube to get music ideas. I think when using Cubase there isn't a lot of reflection going on as I know exactly how to use it, although, I remember there had been a bit of reflection at the start to remember where I got certain effects from and where I get different tools. Having a very musical family, thus having a very musical ear, cutting the music into the best places is very easy for me and the cuts always sound smooth.This relates to the psychologist Howard Gardners' belief in Multiple intelligences: Verbal linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Bodily-kinaesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal etc (refer to Reader 2, p6). I believe to be mainly Musical. I think I hold a few of the other intelligences too such as Bodily-kinaesthetic, Logical and Interpersonal, but I'm strongest in Musicality.
I believe that Gardner's theory is true to me and I'm sure to most people, but there are people who disagree with Gardner's theory such as Nathan Brody. He says that Gardners' "..list of intelligences is arbitrary," but I personally find it, as a non-psychologist, true, and even if Gardners theory is somewhat arbitruary to other psychologists, it makes sense to a lot of non-psychometric people like me. It's far from just being a belief such as religion, of which you relate to in more of an emotional way, this theory just makes sense. I'm definitely not linguistic. My intelligence is within my head. I am very much a person of 'tacit knowledge'. I am a very deep thinker, which I think in turn plays a part in why I am quite logical. I do try to use Jenifer Moon and Karen Osterman's views on the importance of turning tacit knowledge into verbal in some way. I try using metaphors a lot to try to get the right image to a person I may be trying to explain my tacit knowledge to. But even with that, there's a sort of resistance between the verbal and tacit knowledge and it becomes so difficult to attempt a swap over.  "..we can know more than we can tell." (Polanyi, The tacit dimension, 1966 p4)
Twyla Tharp in The creative habit by Tharp and Reiter (refer to Reader 2, p11) talked about muscle memory and how it wouldn't be exactly impossible to turn movements into verbal, but once you start to learn something within your muscle memory (tacit knowledge) and then you are told the movements verbally, you'd start being very skeptical of your own knowledge of the dance. Like I've said about having a kinaesthetic and musical intelligence, as well as being a deep thinker and being non-linguistic, being told my dance routine step by step I would forget the whole thing, because then I'd be thinking too much about the dance instead of relying on what I've always relied on; the music, that helps me to remember certain steps, direction and flow. I can't verbally tell you how, it's partly an emotion, and it then becomes just muscle memory linked to the sounds that I know tacitly.
I can remember dances from when I was seven years old. If a piece of music comes onto the radio or pops into my head, my body just connects and remembers. I had to learn eight shows in two months for my job with P&O Cruises. I went home every night and listened to the music once over and then tried to remember the steps. When I went to bed I would go over the songs in my head and connect as many steps as possible. Then, the next day, I knew nearly the whole thing and better than some of the others who did the same thing as me. This also proves what Gardner says about having multiple intelligences. I was definitely more musical than my other dancing colleagues, therefore they relied more on muscle memory and what they had written down. We all possess different multiple intelligences and my colleagues all possessed some different ones to me.
"Noticing is about being aware of what is happening around us." (David Boud, Reflection in anticipation of events, 2001) Being aware of what is happening around me is something I am quite good at. I can notice when I've said or done something that urges a series of events around me. Sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's good. I learn from all the things that conclude in a bad event and I stop and think before I speak and I try to make things right. That is something I have learned through reflection. It also refers to when I've been in a dance troupe routine and I've regrettably ended up heading the wrong direction. If I hadn't noticed the other dancers going the other direction, I would have completely messed up the routine. I had to think quickly to make it less noticeable that I had made a mistake. This relates strongly to Reflection-in-action: "Reflection-in-action describes the process of working with noticing and intervening to interpret events and the effects of one's interventions."(Boud, Reflection in anticipation of events, 2001) I have had to use this method a lot and it's become quite natural, particularly in performing. Many times has my mind gone blank whilst performing and I've had to intervene by thinking up some other steps until my mind snaps back into action. As a dancer and choreographer, improvisation is something that's been improved over time, due to these mistakes. Like I mentioned earlier, reflection-in-action will be used in my future teaching career. If something isn't working to my lesson plan or if a type of discipline isn't effective, I would have to quickly notice these things and adapt accordingly to rectify the situation and therefore improve on my teaching skills. Reflection-on-action will be just as effective in my teaching career with the use of a journal; like I quoted earlier. I think that I'm stronger in reflection-in-action right now, but I know that in time my journal writing will improve, by keeping in mind of all the people that I've mentioned and what they've said. My offline reflection, resembling reflection-on-action by Robert Kottcamp (refer to Reader 2, p8) needs much development but I'm definitely progressing already.