Reflective Practice

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Reflective Practice
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Reflective Practice -Aims
To build a shared understanding of what the term
reflective practice means. To decide what we
might do to help each other become more
reflective.
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Reflective Practice -Objectives

• By the end of the session participants will be
  able to
• Write a definition of reflective practice
• List 6 characteristics of a reflective
  practitioner
• Explain why reflective practice is a powerful
  idea
• Describe a number of ways and means of supporting
  reflection in a small group.

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Why bother to be reflective?

• reflective teaching requires that public theories
  are translated into personal ones and vice versa
  unless teachers are going to allow themselves to
  be turned into low level operatives, content with
  carrying out their tasks more and more
  efficiently, while remaining blind to large
  issues of the underlying purposes and results of
  schooling. (Griffiths Tann 1991100)

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Throwing Light on the Matter

• Reflection is a process that may be applied in
  puzzling situations to help the learner make
  better sense of the information at hand, and to
  enable the teacher to guide and direct learning
  in appropriate ways. The value of reflection in
  teaching and learning is that it encourages one
  to view problems from different perspectives.
• (Loughran, 1996 p.4)

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John Dewey on Reflection

• 'To reflect is to look back over what has been
  done so as to extract the net meanings which are
  the capital stock for intelligent dealings with
  further experiences. It is the heart of
  intellectual organization and of the disciplined
  mind.' Dewey 1938110

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Schön on Reflection
Six big ideas Knowing-in-action Reflecting-on-act
ion Reflective conversation Frame-experiments Arti
stry and repertoire Over-arching theory
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Knowing-in-Action

"Knowing-in-action" refers to "the spontaneous,
intuitive performance of the actions of everyday
life". (Schön 1983 49) "Our knowledge is
ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of
action and in our feel for the stuff with which
we are dealing. It seem right to say that our
knowing is in our action." (Schön 1983 49)
"thinking on your feet" (Schön 1983 54)
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Reflecting-on-Action

We may reflect on action, thinking back on what
we have done in order to discover how our
knowing-in-action may have contributed to an
unexpected outcome. We may do so after the fact,
in tranquility, or we may pause in the midst of
action to make what Hannah Arendt (1971) calls a
"stop-and-think. (Schön1987 26)
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Reflective Conversations
The RP re-frames problems to create a
reflective conversation in which practice talks
back. In this reflective conversation, the
practitioners effort to solve the reframed
problem yields new discoveries which call for new
reflection-in-action. The process spirals through
stages of appreciation, action, and
reappreciation. The unique and uncertain
situation comes to be understood through the
attempt to change it, and changed through the
attempt to understand it. (Schön 1983 132)
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Frame Experiments
"When the phenomenon at hand eludes the ordinary
categories of knowledge-in-practice, presenting
itself as unique or unstable, the practitioner
may surface and criticize his initial
understanding of the phenomenon, construct a new
description of it, and test the new description
by an on-the-spot experiment." (Schön 1983 63)
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Artistry and Repertoire
"The practitioner has built up a repertoire of
examples, images, understandings, and
actions..... A practitioner's repertoire
includes the whole of his experience insofar as
it is accessible to him for understanding and
action. When a practitioner makes sense of a
situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it
as something already present in his repertoire."
(Schön 1983 138) "The artistry of a
practitioner.....hinges on the range and variety
of the repertoire that he brings to unfamiliar
situations. Because he is able to see these as
elements of his repertoire, he is able to make
sense of their uniqueness and need not reduce
them to instances of standard categories." (Schön
1983 140)
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Over-arching Theory
An overarching theory does not give a rule that
can be applied to predict or control a particular
event, but it supplies language from which to
construct particular descriptions and themes from
which to develop particular interpretations.
(Schön 1983 .273) ..the practitioner does not
consider that he has formed a satisfactory
account of phenomona in any practice situation
until he has framed it in terms of his
overarching theory. If a practitioner has such a
theory, he uses it to guide his
reflection-in-action. The nature of the
reflective conversation varies, from profession
to profession and from practitioner to
practitioner, depending on the presence or
absence, and on the content, of overarching
theory. (Schön 1983 274)

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Recognizing and Becoming
How can we help develop Knowing-in-action Reflec
ting-on-action Reflective conversation Frame-exper
iments Artistry and repertoire Over-arching
theory
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Reflective Practice - Targets

• The reflective practitioner
• Captures thinking in action (Reflection-in-Actio
  n)
• Revisits R-in-A (Reflection-on-Action)
• Takes account of what others say
• Experiments with practice - tries out the new
• Moves practice forward - gets better at it!
• Develops a personal theory of practice

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HOW? David Walker - Journals

• Writing can aid reflection by providing
  objectivity clarifying experience offering
  distance facilitates the drawing out of
  significance focusing attention highlighting
  interpretations providing a basis for developed
  reflection capturing data for later use allows
  the naming of feelings allowing association of
  ideas integration of ideas and allowing growth
  to be seen.

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HOW? Form a Community of Practice
The idea of the community of practice adds a more
social and shared element to reflective practice.
A definition and some notes on Communities of
Practice are available for those who are
interested. (Look under Questions).
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How else?

• What PRACTICAL things could we do together to
  help each other to be more reflective?
• We agreed to
• Keep an individual diary/journal in a form of our
  choice
• Meet in our groups of five to share ideas from
  diaries
• Share reflective emails after each face to face
  Thursday.