1.

The Place of Reflective Practice in Teaching

Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking
about why you do it, and thinking about if it works - a process of selfobservation and self-evaluation.
By collecting information about what goes on in our classroom, and by
analysing and evaluating this information, we identify and explore our own
practices and underlying beliefs. This may then lead to changes and
improvements in our teaching.
Reflective teaching is therefore a means of professional development which
begins in our classroom.

Why it is important

Beginning the process of reflection

o Teacher diary
o Peer observation
o Recording lessons
o Student feedback

What to do next
o Think
o Talk
o Read
o Ask

Conclusion

Why it is Important
Teachers may already think about their teaching and talk to colleagues about
it too. You might think or tell someone that "My lesson went well" or "My

students didn't seem to understand" or "My students were so badly behaved

today."
However, without more time spent focusing on or discussing what has
happened, we may tend to jump to conclusions about why things are
happening. We may only notice reactions of the louder students. Reflective
teaching therefore implies a more systematic process of collecting, recording
and analysing our thoughts and observations, as well as those of our
students, and then going on to making changes.

If a lesson went well we can describe it and think about why it was
successful.

If the students didn't understand a language point we introduced we

need to think about what we did and why it may have been unclear.
If students are misbehaving - what were they doing, when and why?

Benefits of Reflective Practice

The primary benefit of reflective practice for teachers is a deeper
understanding of their own teaching style and ultimately, greater
effectiveness as a teacher. Other specific benefits noted in current literature
include the validation of a teacher's ideals, beneficial challenges to tradition,
the recognition of teaching as artistry, and respect for diversity in applying
theory to classroom practice. Freidus (1997) describes a case study of one
teacher/graduate student struggling to make sense of her beliefs and
practices about what constitutes good teaching. Her initial pedagogy for
teaching was based on the traditions and practices of direct teaching. Her
traditional socialisation into teaching made it difficult for her to understand
that her views of good teaching were being challenged in her practice, but
the opportunity for exploration through reflective portfolio work enabled her
to acknowledge and validate what she was learning.
Roffey-Barentson and Malthouse (2009) introduce 10 useful benefits of
reflective practice (p 16) which are summarised below:
1. Improving your teaching practice
If you take the time to reflect on your teaching, and reflect on how different
parts of what you do work well, where aspects of your teaching can be
improved, and how problems which arise could be solved, that is bound to

help you to improve your teaching.

2. Learning from reflective practice
There is a good range of evidence that purposeful reflection helps deep
learning take place, and for you as a teacher, it will help you to make
connections between different aspects of your teaching and what goes on
around your teaching. Reflective practice will help you gain new learning and
use it in your teaching.
3. Enhancing problem solving skills
When starting off with reflecting on your teaching you may tend to
concentrate on problems which arise. By carefully and honestly considering
and analysing those problems, you will improve your own capacity to find
solutions.
4. Becoming a critical thinker
Critical thinking is about thinking well, and taking charge of your own
thinking (Elder and Paul, 1994), and reflective practice will help you
recognise and adjust what you think to take account of changes in
circumstances, and by doing that help you to be better equipped to find
solutions which work.

5. Making Decisions
As you reflect on your practice, you will find you need to make decisions
about what to do (or not to do) next. You may well have a number of choices
which you have to weigh up, and deciding which one to take can be difficult.
If you regularly reflect on your teaching in depth, you are regularly going to
come across the need to make decisions, but the results of your reflective
practice will help you to make those decisions in a more informed, thoughtful
and objective manner.
6. Improving your own organisational skills

You will notice as this section progresses that the benefits of reflective
practice can reaching into every aspect of your professional work as a
teacher. If you are thinking carefully about what you are doing, identifying
possible actions and choices, trying out solutions, and adjusting what you do
to take account of the results, this involves a good deal of organisation. By
breaking down issues and problems into steps or stages, you will get better
at organising your time and your activity to concentrate on the important,
solution-focussed actions.
7. Managing personal change
Working in education involves managing regular, rapid, pressured and often
confusing change, which can be one of the most difficult aspects of being a
teacher. If you are using the techniques of reflective practice, which involves,
calm, thoughtful, honest, critical and organised thinking and action, this
should introduce a calming and less emotional response to that change. As
reflective practice is itself focussed on seeking positive improvements and
solutions, managing change more effectively should take place.
8. Acknowledging personal values
There will be things which take place within your professional situation as a
teacher which you will wholeheartedly agree with, and others which will
worry or alarm you. This is because they may agree or disagree with your
own personal values such as what you believe in, and what you think is
wrong or right. How these are affected by teaching will vary, but you will
almost certainly come across major clashes of values as part of your work.
Reflective practice is an excellent way of acknowledging and recognising that
those values exist and have an effect, but which concentrates on helping you
to choose approaches and actions which can help you to resolve those
clashes without it adversely affecting the professional balance of your work
as a teacher.
9. Taking your own advice
Teachers are often more critical of their own teaching than anyone else, and
it could be possible for this to develop into an attitude about teaching which
is negative and destructive. The techniques and approaches of reflective
practice will place you in a position where you are an informed, positive
agent in your own development and improvement and one where you can
take your own advice with a confidence tht it is reflective, focussed and
informed advice.

10. Recognising emancipatory benefits

If you reflect on the nine benefits of reflective practice which have so far
been described, you will clearly see that this is a model of practice which
represents the teacher as someone with influence over their own teaching
and their own destiny as a teacher. This is what is at the heart of reflective
practice, and as such it should help considerably to free you from some of
the burdens which can weigh teachers down, and refresh your confidence
and your teaching.
Why the Interest in Reflective Practice?
There are a number of major changes occurring across a range of professions
and professional groups that are having a profound impact on the shape and
nature of professional knowledge. For teachers, perhaps the major factor has
been the re-visioning of traditional (i.e. didactic forms of teaching) forms of
teaching and their replacement with much more flexible approaches of
teaching and learning, and ways of responding to students needs and
interests. The effect of this has been that rigid, teacher-centric forms of
education are no longer the one-size-fits-all answer to teaching children in
schools. Since the latter stages of the 20th Century we have had a
dramatically changed set of conditions. Donald Schon (1991) captured the
essence of these changes for education when he indicated that disciplinedbased forms of knowledge, which in the past had been used to try and
construct grand theories of the way the world works, are no longer relevant.
What we have in their place, are much more locally-based theories that
recognise the idiosyncrasies of specific circumstances and diverse contexts,
and that acknowledge the integrity and worth of knowledge acquired by
teachers as they engage in their day-to-day professional activities. This
represents a major shift in perceptions about what constitutes knowledge.
The view that there are researchers and experts in our society whose
responsibility it is to develop knowledge for and on behalf of teachers, has
endured for a long time. What characterises contemporary needs-responsive
approaches is the much more negotiated (even devolved) ways, in which
teachers are given a much more significant stake in it. As Schon (1991) put it
in his most recent work, what we have is a "reflective turn", in which
practitioners are allowed to give voice to the reasons that lie behind what
they do. What this means, essentially, is that teachers have to grapple with a
changed role - namely, how to work, and how to work with other
practitioners, in a way to observe and describe what it is they do, and with
what effect. Schon (1991) puts it in terms of "exploring the understandings
revealed by the patterns of spontaneity that take up practice" (p.5). The
teachers role, therefore, becomes one of helping students and other
teachers make sense of experience, often in quite strange and puzzlingly

new sets of circumstances - rather than telling them what these experiences
ought to look like.
Some Advantages and Drawbacks
Reflective practice has both advantages and disadvantages: it can positively
affect professional growth but is time consuming and may involve personal
risk. Engaging in practice requires both knowledge of practice and awareness
of professional and personal philosophy. Furthermore, because teaching take
place in settings characterised by ambiguity, complexity, variety and
conflicting values, teachers must make choices and make changes about the
nature of practice problems and how to solve them.
However, before professionals' theories or ideas about practice can be
changed, they must be identified. In skillful knowing-in-action much of the
"skillful action reveals a knowing more than we can say," - a tacit
knowledge (Schon 1983, p. 51). In other words, professionals are not able to
describe what they do to accomplish an activity. However, Osterman (1990)
maintains that an important part of reflective practice is developing the
ability to articulate that tacit knowledge in order to share professional skills
and enhance the body of professional knowledge.
The values, assumptions, and strategies supporting theories and ideas about
practice need to be examined by the teacher therefore, and this adds a
degree of difficulty that makes reflective practice a tough undertaking. If this
clarification does not occur, professionals may find themselves in the
position of espousing one theory but using another in practice, that is, their
actions are not consistent with their intent. In reflective practice, teachers
can expose their actions to critical assessment to discover the values and
assumptions underlying their practice. As professionals become more aware
of their theories-in-use, they become more conscious of the contradictions
between what they do and what they hope to do (Osterman 1990; Schon
1988).
Reflective practice, therefore, can positively affect professional growth and
development by leading to greater self-awareness, to the development of
new knowledge about professional practice, and to a broader understanding
of the problems that confront practitioners (Osterman 1990). However, it is a
time-consuming process and it may involve personal risk because the
questioning of practice requires that practitioners be open to an examination
of beliefs, values, and feelings about which there may be great sensitivity
(Peters 1991; Rose 1992). Engaging in reflective practice requires both
knowledge of practice and awareness of professional and personal
philosophy. Reflection without an understanding of the rules or techniques
that constitute good practice may lead to a repetition of mistakes, whereas
reflection without philosophical awareness can lead to a preoccupation with
technique (Lasley 1989). Schon (1988) suggests that teachers learn to reflect
in action by first learning to recognise and apply standard practice rules and
techniques, then to reason from general rules to problematic cases

characteristic of the profession, and only then to develop and test new forms
of understanding and action when familiar patterns of doing things fail.