The Reflective Educator: Mentoring, Critique, and Professional Growth

The human-side course of the Light and Composition University's Master of Education in Photography. Built on the Dean's book on the mirror and the mentor, it teaches what no lesson plan can carry alone: how to examine one's own teaching honestly, how to walk beside an emerging photographer rather than ahead of them, how to critique a photograph without wounding the photographer, and how to listen for what a student cannot yet say about their own work.

The course then turns to the room and its people — learning styles, classroom weather, the quiet power a teacher holds, and the slow curriculum of confidence — before closing with the educator's own growth: professional development without burnout, a personal teaching philosophy, and a mentoring practicum documented in a reflective portfolio.