What is Reflective Practice in Teaching?
We propose that a promising definition of reflective practice
includes four related processes: description, analysis, explanation,
and reflection. Teacher description of the teaching/learning process
can include videotapes, audiotapes, and written description of teaching
and learning. Analysis involves a kind of problem solving where the teacher
examines what was effective and ineffective with students. Explanation
requires the teacher to communicate orally or in writing regarding the
effectiveness of the teaching/learning process. And reflection requires
the teacher to identify personal meaning or significance. As such, this
final element of reflective practice may often include disclosure of
feelings and subsequent reflective judgments. When adults are engaged
in significant new roles like teaching for the first time, it is valuable
for each of the four processes (i.e., description, analysis, explanation,
and reflection) to be encouraged and guided. In the absence of reflection,
practitioners run the risk of relying on routinized teaching.
Thus, when practitioners engage in reflective teaching, they demonstrate
a capacity (or disposition) to analyze the process of what they are
doing, to reconstruct their professional and personal knowledge schemes,
while simultaneously making judgments to adapt their practice so that
it best matches the needs of students. Research suggests that such
description, analysis, explanation, and reflection bolsters learning
and teacher cognitive development. What cognitive development means
is that new teachers become more tolerant of ambiguity (flexibility),
more ethical in times of stress and conflict, and more caring - in
effect, their worldview has enlarged. An extended review of teacher
learning and cognitive development is available in the following research
summary (Sprinthall, Reiman, & Thies-Sprinthall, Second Handbook
of Research on Teacher Education, 1996).
Considered milestone skills for mature professional judgment and practice
(Schon, 1987), careful analysis and reflection are not, however, necessarily
automatic. In fact, ever since Dewey (1933), at least, educators and
psychologists have grappled with the problems of how persons learn
from experience, and how to identify experiences that are educative.
The difficulty, of course, is the sophisticated and subtle problem
of how persons extract complex meaning from experience. In fact, it
reminds one of Perry's description of development during early adulthood
(1970). In the opening chapter he presents college students at three
levels of complexity by describing their widely differing interpretations
of an essay test question . The exam question is the same but the ability
of the individual student to perceive the meaning governs the complexity
of their interpretation. The same differing interpretations exist for
beginning teachers.
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