One of the most effective ways of developing your teaching is through reflection. I’ve produced a guide to reflective writing (Reflective writing guide for MAAP) which takes you through some of the key models for reflection and how to use these in the context of teaching.

However, I’ve found that none of the existing models quite captures all the aspects of reflection that I find important, so I’ve come up with my own model – DUCKS.

Some of the elements I’ve found missing from the existing models I’ve used are the idea of collaborative reflective practice, both in the sense of using others to enhance reflection (like the peer lens of Brookfield) but also sharing the new ideas you come up with, or the difficulties you’ve encountered, to prevent each person reflectively reinventing the wheel and not getting the benefits of a community of practice. I have also noticed that often the people I speak to about reflecting on teaching are tempted to focus on the negatives rather than acknowledging positive parts of their practice to retain – this is a very human urge to concentrate on what we think we’ve done badly, so I think it’s important to emphasise the aspects of our teaching that are going well.

My new reflective model, DUCKS, builds on existing models to guide people through all the important aspects of reflection. This stands for Describe (what happened), Understand (making sense of what happened in conjunction with others and evidence), Change (what alterations you will make for the next time), Keep (what parts of the session worked well that you will retain or increase for next time), Share (reach out to others to talk about the issues and how you plan to overcome them, and to discuss what has worked well for you and might be useful for others – perhaps sharing with others who are teaching on the same module or programme, or in the same discipline). I intend this model to be easy to remember and to provide clear prompts to work through the reflective cycle in a slightly different way.

To provide an example of how DUCKS reflection might work, we might think about a problem that’s endlessly been debated over the last year or so – students not turning on their cameras for online teaching sessions.

• Describe – None of my first year students are turning on their mics or cameras so I’m teaching to a series of initials and no one responds to my questions. I feel like I’m teaching into the void and it’s quite isolating. I worry that no one is learning anything and because they’re not answering my questions I’m not sure if they understand what I’m explaining to them.
• Understand – Maybe my students just can’t be bothered to take part! Or if I try and put myself in their shoes, perhaps they don’t know each other well enough yet to speak out loud and are worried about showing their home to everyone. I know that I’ve felt awkward in some online meetings about whether I’ve got things set up right so people can see and hear me properly, and it was a bit embarrassing the other day when everyone could hear my baby screaming in the next room.
• Change – I’ll suggest that students can use different backgrounds to protect their privacy to some extent, or maybe just blur out their background. I’ll make more use of the chat functions so students who don’t want to use cameras or microphones can still participate. Rather than expecting people to be able to type long answers out when they might be using a tablet or a mobile, I’ll do some survey questions – just asking people to type ‘Y’ for ‘yes’, ‘N’ for ‘no’ or ‘M’ for ‘maybe’, or asking them to type in a number to represent how they feel on a scale of 1-5. I’m also going to share a question before a brief break to give people a chance to gather their thoughts before they answer.
• Keep – The existing structure of my sessions works well, and I think active learning is vital, so I’m going to keep a focus on  participation rather than just turning it into a transmission-based session where it’s all me talking. I’ve had some good student feedback about the accessibility of online learning, meaning they don’t have to commute onto campus, and the benefits of having things recorded, so I’ll continue doing these lectures online even when we’re able to teach face-to-face again.
• Share – I’m going to speak to the rest of the programme team about doing more community building across the degree cohort so that students become more comfortable and familiar with each other.

I hope you find the DUCKS reflection model useful for developing your teaching  – please let me know if you do!