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Reflective Practice
Reflective practice is an interesting and important concept in the
literature on teaching and learning in higher education. Reflective practice involves
thinking about and learning from your own practice and from the practices of others so as to
gain new perspectives on the dilemmas and contradictions inherent in your educational
situation, improve judgment, and increase the probability of taking informed action when
situations are complex, unique and uncertain. With ongoing reflection, your practice can
develop into a systematic inquiry that begins alone with reflection on your own teaching and
learning experiences but becomes collective when informed by your interactions with
colleagues, students, and theoretical literature.
Unexamined assumptions
Teaching practices often reflect an unquestioned acceptance of values,
norms, and practices defined by others about what is "in the best interests" of students and
teachers, and a lack of awareness of alternative practices. Both uncritically assimilated practices
and new alternatives need critical examination from several perspectives so that the learning and
teaching strategies you use are consistent with your values, beliefs, and assumptions about
learning.
Critical Reflection Perspectives
Source: Adapted from Brookfield, 1995.
Autobiography
Reflective practice begins with critical reflection in which you question
and examine your own passionately held ideas and assumptions about your teaching. In addition,
examining your own positive and negative learning experiences can help you understand why you
gravitate toward certain ways of doing things and avoid others. It helps you to develop and
communicate the rationale that underlies the teaching and learning strategies you use. Your
rationale is an organizing vision that provides direction, purpose, and meaning, prioritizing what
is really important in your work, and informing the actions you take - a set of critically examined
core beliefs, values, and assumptions about why you do what you do in the way that you do it.
Colleagues
For reflective practice to become a collective practice it is important to
make your thinking public and therefore open to dialogue with other faculty. In this way, you can
check your readings of problems, responses, assumptions, and justifications against readings offered
by colleagues who work in situations like yours. Colleagues who observe, engage in critical
conversation, and describe their versions of situations that they face can help you notice aspects
of your practice of which you may be unaware, and suggest surprising new readings of situations you
all share.
Students
It is important to find out how students see what is happening as they
grapple with the process as much as the content of learning, and to elicit the diverse meanings
students read into teachers' words and actions. The meanings you intend to be clear and supportive
may be opaque or confusing to students. It is important to make constant systematic attempts to find
out how students are experiencing the classes you teach and to share this information with your
students. [see Classroom Assessment]
Theoretical literature
Theoretical literature can illuminate general aspects of what you may think
are idiosyncratic events and processes, provide multiple interpretations of familiar situations,
help you to name and understand your experience by approaching it from different perspectives, and
provide resources for alternative practices that may be unfamiliar.
References
Brookfield, Stephen D. (1995) Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Schon, Donald A. (1990) The reflective practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Additional Resources:
Building Pedagogical Intelligence
By Pat Hutchings
Carnegie Perspectives, A different way to think about teaching and learning.
From the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/perspectives2005.Jan.htm
Mindfulness in Teaching
James Rhem, Executive Editor
The National Teaching & Learning Forum (NTLF) Volume 12 Number 2
http://cstl.syr.edu/cstl/ntlf/v12n2/mindfulness.htm
More Information
If you would like more information on this topic, please contact the
Center by email at
mailto:cstl@syr.edu or by phone at 443-4572.
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