Teaching and Learning through Reflective Practice

A Practical Guide for Positive Action

Tony Ghaye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136842528
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, Teaching and Learning through Reflective Practice is a practical guide to enable all those involved in educational activities to learn through the practices of reflection. The book highlights the power that those responsible for teaching and learning have to appraise, understand and positively transform their teaching. Seeing the teacher as a reflective learner, the book emphasises a strengths-based approach in which positivity, resilience, optimism and high performance can help invigorate teaching, enhance learning and allow the teacher to reach their full potential. This approach busts the myth that reflection on problems and deficits is the only way to better performance.

The approach of this new edition is an 'appreciative' one. At its heart is the exploration and illustration of four reflective questions:

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• What's working well?

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• What needs changing?

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• What are we learning?

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• Where do we go from here?

With examples drawn from UK primary teacher education, the book reveals how appreciative reflective conversations can be initiated and sustained. It also sets out a range of practical processes for amplifying success. This book will be a must have for undergraduate and PGCE students on initial teacher training programmes. It will also interest practising teachers, teacher educators and those on continuing professional development courses.

CHAPTER 1
Some Major Developments in Reflective Practice

Teaching and Learning through Reflective Practice: A practical guide for positive action aims to help you understand and take positive action about questions to do with:

who you are;

how you relate to and learn with others;

what you can do (and don’t do) to achieve, be successful and flourish;

enhancing the quality of teaching and learning.

In order to get going on these four aims, I suggest it is important that I clarify a number of significant developments in learning through reflection, during the past ten years. Here are four of them.

Development 1: an expansion in our view of reflective practice

I begin with two clarificatory statements; one about reflection and the other about practice, as both are ‘contested’ terms. In the second edition of this book I’m going to begin with two conventional views of reflection, and then move on from there. Part of the process of reflection involves looking backwards to determine what we have succeeded in achieving already (or failed at doing), to get a sense of where we have come from and what our ‘things to do’ list looks like. Another part of the process, which is often given less attention, is looking forward, and therefore towards achieving our future goals. So, taken together, reflection can be said to involve both projection and review. These are pretty well known. But there are other elements of the process which are particularly significant. One is reflecting and responding in-the-moment. It is what is often called improvisation. In many aspects of human service work, like school teaching, management education, health care, social work, coaching and mentoring, and a range of other public services, improvisation is necessary. Arguably, it is at the heart of the creative process. Some people are generally wary of improvising (of deviating from a ‘script’) because they feel ‘being creative’ necessitates being original, or taking a risk, or having to make things up as they go along. This can be a bit scary.

Arguably, it is prudent to begin with some relatively more commonplace ways of thinking about reflective practice. The first is that there is more than one kind of reflective practice. Table 1.1 shows four important kinds that are often referred to in

TABLE 1.1 Four of the more common views of refection

both practice and in the literature of reflection. Each kind of reflection does a different job. This is important to appreciate. In learning more about yourself, your work or workplace, and when trying to do something differently or better, you often have to be able to use more than one kind of reflection. In general, when people talk about reflection and its practices they have in their minds reflection-ON-practice. When we are teaching, chairing meetings and generally performing in some way, we often reflect-IN-action. We may not always be conscious of doing this. This kind of reflection may be automatic, habitual and intuitive. Reflection can also be done alone or with others. But (D) in Table 1.1 makes an explicit distinction between thinking alone and acting alone or in a work group/team/squad/faculty/department/unit and so on.

Understanding reflection and the practices of it soon takes you to the work of Donald Schön. There is a huge amount written about it. Schön (1983) wrote a very important book called The Reflective Practitioner (with a subtitle, ‘How professionals think in action’). It is a book about the kinds of knowledge professionals need to do their job well. By implication, then, it is also a book about professional expertise. He talked about the importance of re-framing practice in order to make more sense of it. Re-framing means trying to see the same event from different viewpoints or perspectives – for example, from the viewpoint of a child, student, teacher, parent, carer, coach, mentor and so on.

Schön developed the ideas of reflection-IN-action and reflection-ON-practice. You could think about these two notions, described briefly a little earlier, like this:

1. Reflection-in-action. This has two meanings. First, it means reflection in a particular context or workplace – for example, in a classroom, an office, a hospital ward, a leisure centre, a home, a factory and so on. Additionally, it can mean thinking about what you are doing, while you are actually doing it. Some call this ‘thinking on your feet’. Much of this can be unconscious; you may be unaware that you are doing it. For example, you ask a child a question, then read the expression on her face. You quickly see that she doesn’t understand what you have said, so you rephrase the question in your mind and ask it again. This happens quickly, in the heat of the moment. So reflection-in-action is about making on-the-spot adjustments to what you are doing, but in the midst of the action – not two or three days later. It is about improvisation.

2. Reflection-on-practice. This also has two meanings. It can mean reflecting after the event – say, a day or two later. This essentially involves looking back and going over things again. So this kind of reflection is linked with the notion of time. It’s done after the event or an encounter with others. It can also mean focusing on something significant. This is where things can become a bit tricky. For example, what would your regard as a ‘significant’ encounter of incident? This implies that you have to be selective. The key thing is to ask yourself, ‘What’s significant in what I am experiencing and doing?’ You might ask yourself, ‘What’s caught my eye and stayed in my memory?’ You cannot reflect on everything! This is unwise, and not healthy or necessary.

Table 1.1 also shows two more kinds of reflection:

3. Reflection-for-action. This is fundamental. If you reflect on something you’ve done, been involved in or observed, presumably you are doing it for a particular reason. For example, you may want to understand it better, know more about it, change or improve it. These are all good reasons why you might reflect on your work or that of others. This kind of reflection is also about planning to take some (positive) steps to do something with what you’ve learned. This planning aspect is important, because there is a difference between planning for action and action itself. For example, you might see and imagine something being different or better, but actually putting these thoughts into practice, in a particular workplace, is quite different. Additionally, you might think of alternative ways of reducing the time 2-year-old children queue for the attention of a nursery nurse, for help with dressing-up activities, tying shoe laces, doing up zips and buttons. This is quite different from actually doing (or being able to do) something about reducing the queue. Planning-for-action is sometimes called ‘anticipatory reflection’ (van Manen 1991).

4. Reflection-with-action. This again has two meanings. First, it is actually about doing something. It is conscious action to develop your understanding or your skills. It is about weighing up what options you have, making a decision to act in a particular way and then doing it. The ‘with’ part also means acting alone or with others. There are limits to learning and acting alone. Often the power to change and improve something is better achieved by a group or team.

As I have mentioned, there is more than one kind of reflection. There are also many kinds of reflective practices. When I use the term ‘practice’, I take it to mean positive, purposeful action. The purpose may be many and varied, of course, but I confine it in this book to the purpose of ‘bettering’ or improving something. I link the ideas of complexity and duration with this view. Simply put, the more people are involved in or affected by the practice, the more complex it is likely to be. The greater the performance improvement we seek, the more complex the action and the longer it may take. When thinking about action, it is useful to consider the subtleties and different kinds of effort and thinking required. Redwood et al. (1999) set out ten major challenges when thinking about ‘action’. They are shown in Table 1.2.

TABLE 1.2 Ten action challenges

In general, being able to achieve positive action and then to move forward is likely to be determined by at least six interrelated influences:

1. the nature of the feedback and pressure from students, parents, customers, clients, patients, and so on;

2. how safely, efficiently and effectively we feel we can learn new, and different, ways of working;

3. how understandable, and therefore compelling, the case is for new or preferred action towards a ‘better’ practice;

4. how long it took me/us before to complete something similar – this is about our practice memory;

5. the current resources available;

6. the present ‘starting position’ in relation to the desired goal.

Development 2: from deficits and towards strengths

Good reflective practitioners are good at observation. They observe with intense concentration in order to come to know what is going on in the (inter)actions or encounters in front of them and in which they are immersed. They observe and then notice, which is then the basis for reflection. So what is often noticed? Is it what is going wrong? Is it that which is less than desirable? And how does this affect any feedback process? Is this noticing about pinpointing ‘problem/s’ and trying to suggest how these might be ‘fixed’ in the hope that this feedback might enable those involved to ‘go in the right direction’? Some argue that the best feedback is precise, and contains carefully selected detail. I would suggest that the best feedback is about being positive and also about being useful. By this, I mean using feedback (individually or collectively) to help those involved to reframe the current situation in such a way that ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Some Major Developments in Reflective Practice
• CHAPTER 2 Being a Reflective Practitioner
• CHAPTER 3 Some Views of the Nature of Reflection-on-practice
• CHAPTER 4 A Strengths-based Reflective Practice
• CHAPTER 5 Reflection-on-values
• CHAPTER 6 Voicing Concerns and Asking Questions
• CHAPTER 7 Evidence-based Reflective Practice
• CHAPTER 8 Reflection-on-context: Partnership in Practice
• CHAPTER 9 Reflections on the Whole: Thinking Again
• References
• Index