Book Review
"Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher” by Stephen D. Brookfield
Review by Marilyn H. Steinberg, Assistant Professor Library and Learning Resources, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Award-winning author Stephen D. Brookfield has a long and impressive curriculum vitae and author bibliography covering several areas of teaching, including adult education, critical thinking, and teaching methods.  Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher suggests that faculty can improve their teaching by becoming critically reflective!  Steps to do this are spelled out clearly, with personal examples as well as scenarios from Brookfield’s wide network in higher education.  This is more than self-reflection, but does require quite a bit of introspection and autobiographical memory work.  

The book begins with highly detailed definitions and examples of critical reflection pertaining to teaching.  The next few chapters immerse one in autobiography and “knowing ourselves.”  Important in the process of becoming critically reflective is “seeing ourselves through our students’ eyes.” 

One of the main tenets of critical reflection is putting oneself in a learning mode, to better understand the students’ situations with respect to learning.  Several faculty development suggestions are explained, set out step-by-step for the reader, including such things as using teaching logs, teacher learning audits, and role model profiles.   Videotaping our teaching is another way to see ourselves, especially for evaluating gestures, voice, eye contact and other possibly distracting behaviors.

Another way to become a better teacher and become more reflective is to practice some of the methods offered in several chapters covering various ways to see oneself as the students see you.  Methods such as student learning journals, learning portfolios, letters to successors, and several others are all carefully detailed.

An entire chapter is devoted to yet another way to determine how students perceive your teaching, by giving a Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ) at the end of each week of classes.  The purpose is NOT to determine what students liked and disliked, but rather focus on very significant or concrete happenings from that week.  The document is just one page (with a duplicate sheet)and has five questions so that it is not overwhelming.  Students keep a copy for themselves and pass the other in to the teacher.  The copy is used as part of a learning portfolio at the conclusion of the semester when students must summarize their learning and analyze their responses to various incidences from the entire semester.

This book will certainly give every faculty member ideas to improve his/her teaching, but most importantly, it will give faculty the groundwork for truly understanding learning from the students’ perspective, and thereby allow them to improve their own delivery and become critically reflective.

While it is thoroughly engaging, it is very stressful for a professor to really work to become critically reflective.  Modeling behaviors, especially among peers, can be “working on the edge” or “teaching against the grain”.  In the last chapters, Brookfield gives several personal examples, and these show exactly how one can successfully utilize this challenging, important, new way to improve our teaching and ourselves.

Written in a straightforward, linguistically high level, this book motivates me, and will undoubtedly do the same for whomever wishes to improve his/her teaching, and him/herself.  Certainly this is not the usual, run of the mill self-improvement book, so do not be put off by the implication in the title or in this review.  Stephen Brookfield deserves your consideration when you are looking for professional literature whether for personal or professional growth.

Title:  Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher
Authors:  S. D. Brookfield
Price:  $38.00 (hardcover)
Publisher:  Jossey Bass
Year:  1995
Pages:  320

ISBN:  0-78790-131-8