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Reflective Practice
One can think reflectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
After a long day of teaching, Sarah finds herself driving home, thinking about her lessons and her learners. She thinks about Akeem and wonders if he understood the underlying concept of the math lesson. She remembers how Jana, David, and Neve used the reading strategy she taught during independent reading. And she reprimands herself for the way the science experiment had apparently failed. But as she thinks through her reactions to the failure, she realizes that the students’ questions and her instructional decisions actually provided an unexpected opportunity for genuine inquiry. As Sarah drives into her neighborhood, she decides that she will revisit the science experiment in class tomorrow and have her students analyze the procedure and results again. Her decisions show that Sarah is engaging in reflective practice.
Teachers often find themselves asking three fundamental questions: What happened during instruction? Why did instruction and learning unfold as it did? And what does this mean for future planning? These questions are at the heart of reflective practice.
Defining Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is a cognitive process through which an individual attempts to make sense of the world. Asking oneself the questions “What happened?” “Why did that happen?” and “What should I do next?” becomes a habit of mind that leads to deeper understandings and improved outcomes. Reflective practice is also a behavioral process in that the understanding one gains from contemplating an experience is then used to impact future actions. Simply stated, reflective practice requires a person to think about what worked and did not work and then decide how to proceed.
Being a reflective practitioner requires making professional decisions based on the present context and the wisdom gained from prior experiences. It moves beyond submitting to a prescribed method or authority, and it requires seeing beyond the boundaries of repetitive training and common practice. Engaging in reflective practice is an indicator that one has attained professional status in a given field.
Reflective practice is prevalent in many fields and disciplines. Educator Donald Schön (1930–1997) presented reflective practice in terms of professionalism: “Competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. They exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice” (1983, pp. 8–9). In education, teachers work toward a goal of providing instruction that will enable growth and learning with many students each day. Schön’s knowing-in-practice is essential for teachers to be able to efficiently plan and teach. Reflective practice requires that a teacher unpack and examine that unspoken knowledge to confirm efficacy, to challenge assumptions, and to consider innovation. When a teacher considers the conditions and actions that have led up to the present situation, she or he builds a foundation to consider possible courses of action from which to choose.
As introduced earlier, Sarah, a seventh-grade teacher, found herself thinking through her instruction from the school day, considering and reconsidering where her well-planned science experiment had gone wrong.
The magnet experiment did not work today. When the students were trying to determine if several mystery substances were magnetic, some of the substances didn’t react at all. I didn’t know they had oxidized and would not respond to the magnets like I had planned. Two of them should have been attracted to the magnet, but nothing happened. At that moment, I thought I should just stop and tell them what was supposed to happen. I also thought about asking them just to read the textbook example to see how the experiment was expected to go. But I’m glad I didn’t. Jaime asked why the metal shavings, which he knew were supposed to move, were not moving. Instead of giving my hypothesis, I asked the class to take a minute to discuss why they thought the metal shavings were not responding to the magnet. Some of the reasons were feasible. Some of them were not. A few of the students took pride in defending their reasons, and the conversation seemed to last a long time. I think the students were as glad as I was that the bell rang and the class period was over.
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