COUC 747 Week 8 Reflective Essay Example

Reflective Essay: What I Learned About Teaching and Learning in This Course, From Depositing Answers to Designing Practice

Introduction

In my first blog for this course, I wrote that I wanted to become "a clear explainer," the kind of instructor whose lectures students would remember. Eight weeks later, I still value clarity, but I no longer think explanation is the center of teaching. What changed is not a technique but a set of assumptions about who learners are, what learning requires and how faith shapes a teacher's work. This essay describes three of those changes and one question I have not settled.

From Choosing Words to Choosing a Stance

I began the course treating the vocabulary of teaching as a matter of precision: pedagogy for children, andragogy for adults, instruction for content and formation for character. My first blog argued that counselor education is best called formation. I still believe that, but reading Freire (2000) showed me that the words matter less than the stance behind them. A teacher can speak the language of adult learning and still deposit information in passive students. The question is whether I treat learners as thinkers who can interpret their own experience or as containers to be filled. Writing the book review made this sharper, because I had to decide which of Freire's claims I could defend for a graduate classroom and which belonged to his historical setting.

Vella (2002) gave that stance a practical shape. Her insistence on learning about learners before designing a course, and on respecting them as decision makers, now seems to me the teaching equivalent of a counselor's intake. I would not begin counseling without understanding a client; I should not begin a course without understanding a cohort. In practice, that means a short survey before the first class about students' helping experience, their worries about role-play and what they hope to be able to do by the end.

From Planning Lectures to Designing Practice

My biggest shift is that I now build a course around what students will practice, not around what I plan to say. In my fifth blog, I argued for teaching with the grain of how people learn, and the evidence I found while writing my conference paper pushed me further. Research on helping skills training suggests that modeling and combined methods outperform instruction alone (Hill & Lent, 2006), and studies of therapists suggest that experience without deliberate, focused practice does not reliably improve outcomes (Chow et al., 2015). If that is true of therapists, it is likely true of students learning to become therapists. Before this course I had assumed that practicum would take care of skill development; now I think practicum magnifies whatever habits students bring to it, good or poor.

My planned skills course has changed accordingly. Instead of a weekly lecture followed by one role-play, each session will include a brief demonstration, many short practice attempts and immediate feedback. McKeachie and Svinicki (2014) remind new faculty that teaching improves through the same cycle of practice and reflection, so I also plan to record my own teaching and review it with a mentor.

From Faith as a Topic to Faith as a Way of Treating Learners

I entered the course assuming that integrating faith meant adding devotions or Christian content to a syllabus. The Jacobsens' chapters changed that assumption. Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2004) describe faith entering scholarship in many ways, including the questions scholars ask and the virtues with which they work. In my third blog, I argued that counselor education should be faith-informed rather than faith-imposed. I now see that faith shows most clearly in how a teacher treats students: with patience for slow learners, honesty in feedback and respect for students who believe differently. Those habits are harder to put on a syllabus than a devotion, but they are more visible to students. A colleague's response to my blog, asking how a student from another tradition would experience my classroom, has stayed with me as a test I want to apply to every course I design.

A Question I Have Not Resolved

The workshop case my group wrote, about a student who rejected every piece of feedback, left me with a tension I cannot fully resolve. Freire and Vella call teachers into dialogue as colearners, yet counselor educators are also gatekeepers responsible for protecting future clients. I do not think dialogue and gatekeeping are incompatible, but I have not yet learned how to hold both in the same conversation with a struggling student. I expect supervision of my own teaching to be where I learn it. For now, my working answer is transparency: telling students from the first week what competencies are expected, how they will be evaluated and how I will support them, so that a later concern is a continuation of the dialogue rather than a surprise.

Conclusion

I wanted to be a clear explainer. I now want to be a careful designer of practice and a respectful partner in dialogue, whose faith is visible in the way students are treated. The first course I teach will have fewer slides, more practice and more listening. It will begin with a survey of my students, build each session around a practice cycle and end each week with a question about what they noticed in themselves. If my students remember anything, I hope it is not my lectures but the moment they heard themselves respond to a client with real understanding.

References

Chow, D. L., Miller, S. D., Seidel, J. A., Kane, R. T., Thornton, J. A., & Andrews, W. P. (2015). The role of deliberate practice in the development of highly effective psychotherapists. Psychotherapy, 52(3), 337-345. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000015

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 30th anniversary ed.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970)

Hill, C. E., & Lent, R. W. (2006). A narrative and meta-analytic review of helping skills training: Time to revive a dormant area of inquiry. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 43(2), 154-172. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-3204.43.2.154

Jacobsen, D., & Jacobsen, R. H. (2004). Scholarship and Christian faith: Enlarging the conversation. Oxford University Press.

McKeachie, W. J., & Svinicki, M. (2014). McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (14th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Vella, J. (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: The power of dialogue in educating adults (Rev. ed.). Jossey-Bass.