Life Long Learning Project

Foundation Stones - Reflective Practice

Introduction

Reflection allows us to think about our actions to gain new insight.

It is a structured way of thinking about work, its aim being to help you to reflect on your practice and develop it to the best of your abilities. This can happen on your own; with peers 1:1 or in a group.

Background

Acquiring knowledge through reflection can be traced back to the ancient Greek Philosophers. A more recent philosopher - John Dewey claimed that:

"We learn by doing and realising what came from what we did"

Kolb's learning cycle shows how a reflective process can benefit your development and we will be looking at this in more detail during the workshops.

Kolb's Learning Cycle

The ability to apply knowledge calls on us to act on what we have learnt, reflection is part of that process. Whilst we all have natural learning styles the idea of undertaking some evaluation of what is happening to us in our every day working can be developed. Therefore reflection is a learnt skill we can acquire through practice.

 

 

Schon (1992) discusses two types of reflection: reflection on  action and reflection in action

Reflection on action

This is the retrospective analysis and interpretation of practice in order to uncover knowledge used and the accompanying feelings within a particular situation.

Reflection in action

This is a process whereby the practitioner recognises a new situation and thinks about it while still performing. The practitioner is able to select and remix responses from previous experience, when deciding how to solve a problem in practice.

Core Skills of Reflection

The core skills of reflection include:- Description, self awareness; critical analysis, evaluation and synthesis.
There are many different models of reflection but they all incorporate these core skills.

Further Information

Teaching handouts about effective learning, used by the Lifelong learning team.