Reflective practice of undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) using the Vitruvian Model of Reflective Practice (VMRP)

Marjan Roshandel, marjan.roshandel@knights.ucf.edu, Ethan Cote, ethan.cote@knights.ucf.edu, Christopher Randles, christopher.randles@ucf.edu

University of Central Florida

Reflective Practice among educators often results in an imbalanced examination of past events, missing critical points that affect their teaching practice. Instructors fill an important role in education as they manage and shape the delivery of content knowledge to students. There is often some disconnect between what Instructors plan for a lesson and the enacted plan during a lesson, which can impact learning. Blair proposed the Vitruvian Model of Reflective Practice model (VMRP) to help remedy some of these shortcomings in other reflective practice models (e.g., cumbersome, prescriptive, etc.). The model is a structured self-reflection that focuses on 4 domains of instruction: Affective, Cognitive, Conative, and Psychomotor. In this study undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) were invited to complete 6 reflective accounts across consecutive weeks using the VMRP model. The worksheets were analyzed for emerging thematic codes to develop profiles and systematic considerations made during ULAs reflections. Here we present the results of the affective domain, representing the complexity of ULAs considerations when developing professional relationships in their classroom, and the challenges they encountered when trying to develop these relationships.