CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT IN CDIO: ENHANCING FACULTY COMPETENCY IN REFLECTIVE PRACTICE

An increasingly popular tool used by teachers to continually update and expand their professional knowledge base and to improve their teaching practices so as to address the learning needs of students is reflective practice; which requires teachers to look at what they do in the classroom and think about why they do it, if it works and why it works; and vice versa. This paper advocated for the specific elaboration on the use of reflective practice in the CDIO Framework. It consists of 2 main parts. The first part questions of the meaning of reflective practice in the “traditional” sense as currently used in the literature. The second part proposes an “extended” use to drive continual improvement at the program level. For the first part, the paper first presents a quick literature review of reflective practice and other similar sounding words such as reflection, reflexivity, etc and strives to clarify the subtle differences among them. The paper then argues that the word ‘reflection’ as used in CDIO Standards 9 and 12 also needs further elaboration as they appeared to address 2 different target groups, namely students and lecturers respectively. The paper argued that clarity is necessary as witnessed by the increasing number of papers presented at International CDIO Conferences had used the terms interchangeably and can cause confusion among the CDIO community; as evidenced by the “quick-and-dirty” review on past papers retrieved from the CDIO Knowledge Library. The first part concludes with sharing of an evidence-based reflective practice toolkit from Singapore Polytechnic which had made reflective practice mandatory for all teaching staff. The second part of the paper argues for the use of reflective practice beyond individual lecturers, and advocated for use in continual improvement alongside the self-evaluation process based on the 12 Core CDIO Standards. This part briefly discusses papers from the earlier “quick-and-dirty” study to look for those with focus on program evaluation. The paper then shares the author’s own approach which is derived from the metaphor of Mirror, Microscope and Binoculars widely used in service learning projects. More specifically, the paper demonstrates how the same metaphor can be used to guide the self-evaluation by mapping each item to the 12 CDIO Core Standards. Lastly, this paper concludes by proposing performance indicators that can be used to assist lecturers in assessing the effectiveness of his/her reflective practice process which is applicable to both teaching and learning setting as well as program evaluation.