Promoting critical reflection for academic professional development in higher education

Abstract

Higher Education lecturers in Mozambique are witnessing a chain of transformations within this sub-system including expansion of institutions, diversity of offered courses, huge admission of students resulting in more diverse student populations and the need to introduce new methods of facilitating learning and research as response. These changes, along with the rapid increase of the body of knowledge, challenge lecturers to improve themselves as academics. Contemporaneous models of professional development view this process as a constructive and situated endeavour, which should be practice-, problem-, value- and evidence-based and have reflection as its essential element. Having considered these aspects, I formulated the following research question: How can we promote critical reflection on innovative practice contributing to professional development of academic staff in Mozambican Higher Education Institutions? In order to address this research question, I adopted action research complemented by a mixed-methods approach. Therefore I carried out a baseline study entailing the administration of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires on innovative practices of lecturers. This baseline study aimed at mapping the field concerning practices to promote professional development, employment of Learning Style Flexibility (LSF) and the adoption of tools for reflection by lecturers. LSF is an approach to facilitating learning drawn from the whole-brain model of Ned Herrmann. It calls for adopting strategies of facilitating learning associated with the entire brain, not relying solely on the promotion of left brain learning. I adopted action research to monitor my practice of facilitating learningshops as an experimental professional development intervention and animated mentoring sessions to support and assist lecturers’ professional learning. Such professional learning consisted of lecturers implementing LSF within their practice of facilitating learning and monitoring this process by means of their small-scale action research. In this way I was putting into practice a synchronous model. As data collection techniques I employed the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), photography and audio- and video-recording of learningshops and mentoring sessions. Audio-recording the sessions I could collect the lecturers’ reflections. Later on, I analysed such reflections as nested within the lecturers brain profiles, pursuing a model of Learning Style Flexible Reflection (LSFR). Findings of the baseline study show the need to have a more organised and functional model of professional development in Mozambique, the need to explore the potential for scientific research through the adoption of a number of measures, as well as the need to promote lecturers’ reflection, deepening the use of tools already being employed in the context. Apart from this, this baseline information showed that the principles of LSF are not employed in a balanced and consistent manner since most lecturers indicated to facilitate student learning through strategies linked to the left brain. The action research findings show that the learninghops that I promoted with my hybrid group appeared to be effective in promoting lecturers’ critical reflection. In involving lecturers in this experimental professional development programme I promoted the possibility for them to account for what they were doing in their lecturing practice in a scholarly way. Therefore action research appeared to be the appropriate process to follow within the context of my mentorship. Moreover, action research proved to be the self-reflective inquiry lecturers can employ in pursuit of explanations for their transformative lecturing practices in the pursuit of ways to show that they are successfully working according to their values, and that their efforts are useful to improve their situations and institutions, since they are grounded within the idea of promoting reflection on one’s practice. All these aspects were evident from the lecturers’ case studies reported in this study. One of the main findings of the study is that the analysis of lecturers’ reflections, as nested within their brain profiles, and informed by the literature review, showed the emergence of LSFR, where lecturers could present different patterns of reflection associated with the different brain quadrants