Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is associated with experience-based learning. Professionals successfully employ reflective practice, a crucial lifetime learning tactic. Professionals who are qualified, independent, and self-directed can be developed through reflective practice. Reflective practice fosters both professional and personal growth and closes the gap between theory and practice.
Key Elements of Reflection
Reflection has following key
- Making sense of experience
- ‘Standing back’ to gain a better perspective of the experience.
- Repetition and checking for missing things
- Deeper honesty to accept the normal course of events
- ‘Weighing up’ and balanced in judgement
- Clarity as viewing the events being reflected by a mirror
- Deeper understanding
Making judgments to develop or adopt a strategy, activity or an approach.
Models of Reflection
A number of models of reflection have been put out to help individuals engage in the process of reflection. It is up to the individual to choose a model or framework for reflection that suits him and allows him to draw lessons from his prior learning experiences. Below is a discussion of some of the significant models of reflection.
Gibbs Reflective Cycle
Gibbs (1988) introduced a fairly simple reflective cycle that promotes a clear description of the situation, analysis of feelings, evaluation of the experience, analysis to make sense of the experience, conclusion where other options are considered, and reflection upon experience to examine what you would do if the situation arose again.
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Johns (2000) Model for Structured Reflection
A critical event analysis or a general reflection on experience can be guided by John’s structured reflection approach. For more intricate analysis and decision-making, this might be helpful.
Rolfe et al (2001) Framework for Reflexive Practice
The questions such as “What? What so? And now, what can encourage introspection at all levels? For level 1 reflection, the model can be used merely at the descriptive level. The framework’s sequential and cyclical sequence is indicated by the arrows at the top of the diagram. To describe the circumstance, the practitioner first considers it. In order to learn from the circumstance, the second phase encourages the practitioner to develop personal theory and expertise. At the third level, the practitioner evaluates his or her activities, thinks about methods to make things better, and considers the effects of those acts. According to Rolfe et al., this last phase has the potential to have the biggest impact on practice.
Reflective Thinking in Teaching
In essence, reflection is the critical thinking and analysis of our own and our students’ experiences and behaviors with the goal of enhancing professional practices. It makes it possible to modify general teaching and learning guidelines to fit our specific situation and enhance instruction. To become a scholar teacher, one must be a “reflective practitioner.” The pedagogical strategy to encourage independent learning with the goal of enhancing students’ critical thinking, comprehension, and abilities is a prerequisite for instructors’ reflective practice. Put another way, reflective practice in teaching is the process of critically analyzing one’s own methods of instruction in the classroom and identifying the most effective approaches to employ for the students. Theoretical and tacit knowledge are continuously integrated.
Enabling Reflective Thinking in Learning
Learning requires reflection, which must be combined with action. Constructivists see education as the process of creating knowledge and understandings of the world via inquiry, analysis, and interpretation. Thus, reflection serves as a bridge between assimilating new information and incorporating it with preexisting knowledge of the environment. The value of reflection in education is found in its capacity to provide students new perspectives, make sense of their ideas, and enhance their comprehension of the world.
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Following steps can be taken to enable students for reflective learning
For helping the students to learn to reflect
The First Stage is Presenting Reflection
- Explain how reflection is different from other familiar forms of learning
- Give examples of reflective writing – good and poor
- Generate discussion of students’ conceptions of reflection
- Enable practice on reflective writing and provide opportunities for feedback
- Give a starting exercise
- Expect to support some students more than others
- Be open about your need to learn about this form of learning and how to manage it
- The Second Stage is Deepening Reflective Work
- Use examples to demonstrate deeper reflective activity
- Introduce a framework that describes levels of reflection
- Introduce exercises that involve ‘standing back from oneself’.
- Introduce exercises that involve reflection on the same subject from different viewpoints of people / social institutions etc.
- Introduce an exercise in reflection on the same subject from viewpoints of different disciplines
- Introduce an exercise that involves reflection that is influenced by emotional reactions to events
- Collaborative methods of deepening reflection–e.g. critical friends and group, activities etc.
Ways of Reflection
There are two ways of reflection which include formal and informal reflection.
- Informal Reflection
- Formal Reflection
Formal reflection is based on the findings of theory and research
Modes of Reflective Practice
Researchers have identified three modes of reflective practice.
Reflection in Practice
This entails reflecting on the teacher’s actions and behaviors during the classroom teaching process. Teachers can think independently and solve issues that arise in their daily teaching by engaging in this kind of contemplation.
Reflection on Practice
It refers to the teacher’s reflections following his instruction in the classroom with an emphasis on transpiration and elements of the classroom experience that either helped or impeded learning during interactions with the pupils.
Reflection for Practice
It is the teacher’s way of thinking about how past practice will help future experiences. The instructor makes decisions in the future based on his understanding of his prior experiences. Teachers can develop new understandings of theories in a variety of contextual contexts through reflection in practice.
Possible Benefits of Reflective Practice Used by Teacher
Reflection can be helpful for us as teachers because it
- Allows us to consciously develop our own repertoire of strategies and techniques to draw upon in our teaching, which are relevant to our particular context and discipline.
- Helps us take informed actions that can be justified and explained to others and that we can use to generate answers to teaching problems.
- Allows us to adjust and respond to issues and problems. For instance, rather than being devastated by a poor teaching evaluation, it allows us to investigate and understand.
- helps us to become aware of our underlying beliefs and assumptions about learning and teaching so we understand why we do what we do and what might need to change.
- Helps to become conscious of our potential for bias & discrimination.
- Enables us to make the best use of the knowledge available.
- Enables to avoid past mistakes
- Helps to maximize our own opportunities for learning.
- Provides guidance & frameworks for practice
- We can acknowledge immediate feelings, and then stand back from them
- Reflection helps us to see what went well and focus on the positive side of an event as well as the more negative
- Helps us to develop a problem-solving approach, rather than avoiding thinking about difficulties
- Helps us to locate our teaching in the broader institutional, social, and political context and to appreciate the many factors that influence student learning. In this way,
- Reflection helps us to keep our perspectives and to avoid blaming ourselves for every problem that arises in our classrooms.
Measures to Integrate Reflective Practice in Teacher Education
Curriculum
A combination of theoretical and tacit knowledge forms the foundation of efficient professional preparation, such as teacher preparation. As a result, practitioners anticipate that student teachers’ classroom experiences will be applicable to actual classroom scenarios. Professional preparation programs, clinical experiences, and internships should be created with three goals in mind. The first goal is to help student teachers acquire theoretical knowledge that will enable them to describe, explain, and anticipate behavior that affects effective teaching. Second, student teachers will become proficient in the process of reflection and acquire the ability to evaluate their actions and results in light of current professional knowledge. Lastly, by examining their choices in light of contextual factors in the classroom, student instructors will use reflection to bridge theory and experience. Giving teachers the tools they need to solve practical issues that defy textbook solutions is the ultimate goal in achieving these goals.
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