The professor reflects on his goals for teaching and beliefs about the learning process. His main goal is to develop students' critical thinking skills so they can apply knowledge to real-world situations, rather than just memorizing theories. He believes teaching should guide students to achieve course goals and help them become professionals. The professor also reflects on using project-based learning combined with in-class guidance and blended learning to encourage deep learning over surface learning.

1. Reflective Journaling (1):
Assessing my Own Teaching
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 146
When asked to assess your goals for teaching, what are you supposed to reflect upon? Though the question sounds rather ambiguous, it can be directed to address my beliefs about the learning process. Understanding that students may be learning differently in terms of purpose, we must admit that we have deep-learning-oriented students and surface-learning-guided learners. Based on this premise, my goals for my teaching is to raise awareness -among my students- of the importance of developing one’s critical thinking skills. These skills can be quite practical and useful during one’s professional practice and career. To sum up, I want my pupils to become thinkers and not just brains that can regurgitate theory that they cannot relate to anything tangible or intangible in the real world.
How about asking yourself about your beliefs about teaching? Though the question again is ambiguous, once more it can make us reflect on our basic beliefs about our performance in class. Though I now teach on a sort of blended learning fashion, I must confess that I need to make good use of my F2F time with my learners. While I am dealing with students, I see myself as a trainer with a group of trainees who need to be

2. guided to achieve the course’s goals, but successfully. Success in this very case is not just to be able to replicate a behavior, as stated in Bloom’s Taxonomy, but the ability to use the recently-acquired knowledge in different scenarios related or unrelated to their current or future working environment. In short, I want to have my pupils well-trained for the moment they become professionals looking to find their niche in the working world.
As a teaching professional at the university level, all of us have to be certain that learning is coming every single week. As for my experiences and new knowledge is the understanding of the learning dichotomy that learners are exposed to: “deep learning” or “surface learning?” For a test in or out of class both types of students can succeed, but for what it may mean for one’s future professional life, it may simple be just a lost memory lying somewhere in the back of one’s mind that cannot be retrieved, some sort of a blocked memory. For this learning dichotomy I cannot work with learners unless I design and then develop a hands-on activity that “forces” them to comprehend processes and behaviors that they need to replicate to accomplish a final product at the end of my learning tasks. In brief, PBL (Project-Based Learning) combined with F2F guidance and a blended phase on their own can be a way to set the path for students to walk towards their development of deep learning.
Have you ever been provided with a strategy that resonated with you? I bet all of us in education “suffer” from frequent epiphanies. My latest sudden realizations were connected to create an effective “bridge” between what happens in class (F2F teaching), what learners have to do on their own (application of newly-acquired knowledge or blended learning scenario), and what needs to happen in class the next time you meet with your students (learning consolidation activity and [formative & summative] feedback). The second was the introduction of dense questioning, a technique used in reading skills, literature, etc. The combination of these two elements have been quite enlightening for my current teaching. It never occurred to me that these two pieces were part of the same puzzle and learning in my teaching journey.

3. Oxford Brooks University. (2014). What is a Reflective Journal? Retrieved on 2014, Sept. 20 from the Oxford Brooks University website at https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/upgrade/pdf/reflectiveJournal.pdf
Northern Illinois University, Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center. (2014). Reflective Journals and Learning Logs. Retrieved on 2014, Sept. 20 from the Northern Illinois University website at http://www.niu.edu/facdev/resources/guide/assessment/reflective_journals%20and_learning_logs.pdf
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