What is reflective practice?
Moon (1991) defined reflective practice as an active, action-based and ethical set of skills, that enable one to reflect on their actions and practices, and in-turn shape future practice . Timperley, Wiseman and Fung (2003) identify that reflective practice, for teachers, sees them continually updating and expanding their professional knowledge base in an attempt to improve or revise their practices so as to meet the learning needs of their increasingly diverse students.
- Moon, J. (1999), Reflection in Learning and Professional Development: Theory and Practice, Kogan Page, London.
- Timperley, H. Wiseman, J. Fung, I. (2003) The Sustainability of Professional Development in Literacy, Part 2. Final report to the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Education, Wellington New Zealand.
Activity: Developing a reflective practice
After reflecting on the concepts learned within the videos contained in Module 4, here is a list of things to consider when implementing reflective practice:
- Knowledge, skills, and attitudes
- Procedure, methods, and design
- Prior experiences
- Active experimentation
- Aesthetic, personal, ethical, empirical, reflexive
- Reflection-on-action
- Reflection-in-action
- Self-analysis
- Perspectives
- Challenges
- Cyclic nature
- Further developments or professional training
Questions to ask myself:
- What was learnt through the learning experience?
- What worked well?
- What needs improvment?
- How does this link to other units?
- How do other unit inform what I’m putting into action?
- Where my goals met?
- How did I interact with others?
- How did others interact with me?
- Did this change my professional phisosphy?
- Now what?
I like how you have created a list of concepts to consider in reflective practice.
One of my favourite reflective questions is ‘what went wrong and what would I do differently next time? So many people don’t like making mistakes but it’s the mistakes that we learn from.
Best of luck Sparkles.