Reflective Practice

Reflective Pactice Revisited

The text starts by pointing out its main purpose, which is to go back to the reflective practice and revitalize it since it seems to be forgotten; the author also states that it is operating in a superficial way. He expresses that to have a successful reflective practice, it is necessary to have classroom discourse and dialogs with colleagues, but this argument will be expanded later on. The path the author suggest is to talk about key issues that have emerged the last years and some ways to revisit the reflective practice. The author stars by citing Dewey developed by Schön (1983, 1996) which make the differentiation between reflecting-in-action and reflective-on-action. On the first hand, it is related with the decisions taken immediately on the moment of the class and that these reflections in actions are found to be helpful to promote learning; on the second hand, it has to do with reflecting after the class that is crucial for promoting professional development. Further one, the author says that defining reflective practice (RP) is problematic due to the lack of stablished definitions found, but he agrees that most of definitions has two words in common: “actions” and “criticality”. He continues the discussion by focusing on the problems of reflective practice and one of them is that RP has become useless, tired and overused. Author like Boud (2010) estates that there is not a clear pattern to follow; in fact, none of these models teach us how to reflect. Following with the main problems, it not only has different definitions, but also different positions. For example, some authors say that RP can be taught explicity, others state that it can be practiced through tools like journals, others think that RP is better if it is done orally rather than written, or that it has to be assessed, and so on. Different from that, Kolb (1984) proposes a model that starts with concrete experience, then, it moves to observation and reflection, after that, it goes to forming abstract concepts, and finally, it ends in testing in new situations. These types of models are usually critiqued due to the different interpretations that students in teaching programs can make of them, and at the end, it turns into a requirement and not a reflective exercise. The author proposes three main points to discuss. The first one is the need of data, the second one is that reflective practice is an individual task, and the third one is the lack of appropriate tools. The author not only stablishes the issue, but he also states and suggests solutions. Regarding the first point, the main issue is that normally, RP has no data and evisence, and he stated that it is necessary to have sustained and structure data to evidence how reflection looks like; some examples of the data could be recordings, colleagues comments or feedback from students. The solution the author suggest is to motivate teachers to participate in action reseach, with is to make them researchers of their own practice. The second issue he states is that RP has been being individual and in written ways, but he claims that reflection is not an individual task; actually, having dialogues with colleagues and listen to a pair’s feedback can improve the reflective practice. The final issue proposed is that there are not useful tools to practice reflection since the existing ones are mostly for written reflection that can fail. What he suggests is to create tools keeping into account the specific context, setting and participants; that way, RP will enhance teachers’ professional development and promote understanding of their practice. As a way of conclusion, this text presented the degradation reflective practice have had, its principal issues, but also the possible solutions and some suggestions to keep practicing this important aspect of the professional development for teachers. He suggested that it is necessary to have a clear focus, to change the paradigm that reflection need to be individual and keep more attention to the dialogue between colleagues and finally, to find and appropriate tool that help teachers reflect in a conscious and suitable way.