Bullock (2025) lecture on how teachers learn presented the idea that teachers can learn from problematic situations when they engage in reflection-in-action in the action present, which may lead to reframing and developing of knowledge-in-action. I concur as I have experienced this in my practice. I think and learn from problematic situations when they occur, in addition, I reflect on these experiences more at the end of the day especially during my long commutes to and from work. I also learned from these lectures that I often make the mistake of always trying to write in conventional academic style which is one of my weaknesses because it is much easier for me and more authentic when I write in a more personal expressive style and write about my own experiences. In this lecture I also learned some useful ideas about keeping a learning journal. For example, including all the details combined with expressive language will serve to convey how you felt to the reader. Also creative and expressive writing using first-hand experiences and including all the details of experiences with imagery and visuals and so on.

“In some of my earlier work, I argued that self-study methodology was a ‘basis-for-knowing’ rather than a ‘knowledge base’. It is thus incompatible with the ambitions of technical rationalism” (Bullock, 2025).

Bullock (2025) discussed how knowledge generated by self-study could be conceptualized by tensions: telling and growth, confidence and uncertainty, action and intent, safety and challenge, valuing and reconstructing experience, planning and being responsive. The tension that interests me is safety and challenge because I have to deal with this tension in my teaching practice. To use just one example among the many instances in my daily teaching practice, in robotics the students are often carried away with enthusiasm and would want to design or build a challenging robot that I as the teacher know that may be unattainable due to many constraints. How do I steer them into the direction of making a robot that they are able to make? Or do I leave them to fail? When they fail they will learn but is that safe to do? Also telling the students that a robot is too difficult to build or there is not enough time to design a robot could be construed as ableism.

In my classroom teaching, I feel that many students develop learned helplessness from other courses and want me to give them answers or show them how to do the assignment whereas my course is designed more towards self-directed learning.

A problem in my teaching practice is cheating on assignments and students’ use of generative AI to cheat on assignments is a particular problem in my practice. In pursuing studies in this course, I learned that that I need to change my teaching practice and pedagogy to one that includes more student-centered learning activities, authentic problem-based learning activities and assessment tasks that are ‘real-world’, tasks requiring students to deal with uncertainty and unpredictability, approximating the real world. While reading vanOostveen, Desjardins & Bullock (2019), I found an eureka moment in research into my particular problem of practice, namely students cheating on assignments.

I find the Collaborative Online Learning Environment (COLE) developed by vanOostveen, Desjardins, & Bullock (2019) very interesting and I immediately began thinking what I can take away for a system geared for the high school students that I teach since I have been looking for such a system. When I have the time, I intend to come back to studying this bit of research more thoroughly. Similarly, I look at what I learned about self-study in this module and wonder what I can take away and apply to self-directed learning in my teaching practice.

References

Bullock, S. M. (2025). How teachers learn: A future [Lecture Notes]. Retrieved from https://learn.ontariotechu.ca/courses/32126

vanOostveen, R., Desjardins, F., & Bullock, S. (2019). Professional development learning environments (PDLEs) embedded in a collaborative online learning environment (COLE): Moving towards a new conception of online professional learning. Education and Information Technologies, 24(2), 1863–1900.