Week 5: Looking through multiple lenses
Want to understand your teaching more fully? This week introduces Brookfield's framework of 4 lenses for reflection.
Listen to the Week 4 podcast for more about uncovering core assumptions and my responses to the reflection prompts from last week.
No matter how experienced or thoughtful we are, our view of teaching is always limited by our own perspective. This week, we explore how different vantage points can help us see our practice more clearly and more critically. Stephen Brookfield’s four lenses of critical reflection offer a structured way to examine teaching from multiple angles.
The lens of personal experience reveals the assumptions that shape course expectations and highlights how past struggles or values influence current teaching practices.
Exploring what students see can help us recognize gaps between intention and experience and offer guidance for better aligning course design with learner needs.
Colleagues’ perspectives may offer alternative interpretations, share effective strategies, and provide support.
Finally, educational theory offers a conceptual foundation for making intentional, research-informed changes to practice.
The goal of using the four lenses is to examine our teaching from multiple perspectives in order to uncover assumptions, deepen understanding, and make more informed, equitable decisions.
Applying Brookfield’s Four Lenses to the Scenario
Last week, we considered the scenario of an instructor puzzling over student participation in discussions. In a graduate seminar, they have noticed that students don’t seem to be completing the readings before coming to class. As a result, classroom discussions feel shallow, and class time increasingly shifts toward lecture just to maintain momentum. The instructor is frustrated and uncertain about how to address the issue. Let’s use Brookfield’s four lenses to consider alternative perspectives.
✍️ Personal Experience
In this scenario, the instructor might begin by reflecting on how their own background shapes expectations. Perhaps they thrived in academically rigorous environments or were trained to value independent preparation and self-discipline. These experiences may lead to an assumption that graduate students should be intrinsically motivated or able to manage heavy reading loads. Reflecting on past struggles or successes can surface the hidden values that influence course design—such as favoring reading-intensive formats or offering limited flexibility.
💡Insight: Lived experience surfaces the values, biases, and habits that shape how instructors define academic rigor and student responsibility.
👀 Students’ Eyes
With this lens, the instructor shifts focus from their own background to how students are actually experiencing the course. Students may be balancing multiple roles—working, caregiving, teaching—and might find the readings dense, disconnected, or de-centering. They may not see how the texts support their goals, or may not feel welcomed into the academic conversation. This lens calls on the instructor to seek out students’ perspectives and listen closely to what’s working, what’s not, and why.
💡Insight: Student feedback - both formal and informal - illuminates the gap between the instructor’s intentions and the students’ experience.
🗣️ Colleagues’ Perspectives
In this scenario, the instructor might bring up the issue in a conversation with a colleague or small group. These conversations can offer validation, suggest practical strategies, and prompt reflection on how the reading is framed within the course.
💡Insight: Peer feedback reframes the issue as part of a shared teaching challenge, not a personal failure.
📚 Educational Theory
In this scenario, the instructor might revisit readings on critical pedagogy and student engagement. Cognitive load theory1 can explain how the volume and complexity of readings can tax students’ mental resources and make it harder to absorb or apply what they’ve read. Self-determination theory2 suggests that a lack of autonomy, relevance, or connection to the material can diminish students’ intrinsic motivation to engage - especially with demanding tasks like dense reading. Threshold concept theory3 suggests that some material may be difficult not because it’s too much, but because it’s transformative. If students are avoiding readings, it may signal they’re grappling with knowledge that unsettles their prior understanding - and they may need scaffolding, not simplification.
💡Insight: Theory offers new frames for interpreting what’s happening and provides a conceptual basis for changing practice.
Using all four lenses turns a frustrating teaching moment into an opportunity for growth. Instead of defaulting to assumptions or blame, the lenses help us gather input to make thoughtful, informed changes. Over the next few weeks, we will focus on each lens to practice what it looks like to pause and learn from each perspective.
Before we dive into each lens in more detail over the coming weeks, here are a few ways to begin thinking about how these perspectives already shape your teaching decisions.
🔎 INQUIRE
Consider this: Which “lens” do you rely on most when making teaching decisions? And which one do you tend to avoid or overlook? What might it reveal if you tried to see your teaching through a different lens—especially one that feels less familiar or comfortable?
✏️ APPLY
List the four lenses in order from most to least familiar or most to least comfortable. Next to each one, jot a few notes:
Why is this lens more intuitive or challenging?
What types of teaching moments trigger each perspective (e.g., a student comment, a peer observation)?
What might help you expand your use of the lens that feels least natural?
💬 CONNECT
Ask a colleague: When you're stuck with a teaching challenge, what helps you get unstuck? See if their response maps to one of Brookfield’s lenses - do they turn inward (autobiography), seek student input, talk to a peer, or look to theory? Compare your tendencies and share how each of you might try expanding your reflective toolbox.
🧩 SCALE
If you facilitate reflection with others, how might you use the four lenses to structure a conversation, workshop, or learning community? Consider how these lenses might surface different types of insight—personal, student-centered, relational, theoretical—and how balancing them can enrich collective understanding. What patterns do you notice in the types of reflection faculty tend to gravitate toward or resist?
If you listen to the podcast that will be published later this week, I’ll share my responses to these prompts there. For access to the weekly podcast - and to support the work of Tips in providing free faculty development opportunities - consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Next week, we’ll focus on the personal and student lenses to explore how those experiencing the same classroom activities can end up seeing things so differently.
© 2025 Tips for Teaching Professors
Sweller, John. 1988. “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science 12 (2): 257–85. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4.
Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. 2000. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.” American Psychologist 55 (1): 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.
Meyer, J. H. F., and Ray Land. 2003. “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines.” In ISL10 Improving Student Learning, 412–24. United Kingdom: Oxford Brookes University.