Reflective Practice

I believe that reflective practice is a very important tool in today’s education. As I am relatively new to teaching I have found that I am faced with new challenges and obstacles in both the classroom and the workshop environment each day. I believe that for myself to have a good lesson I need to be self critical of past lessons, picking out not only the good parts but also parts of a lesson that didn’t go so well. Since covering reflective practice in Cert Ed class I found that I have become more aware of being critical towards my own lessons. The ability to reflect critically on one’s experience, integrate knowledge gained from experience with knowledge possessed, and take action on insights is considered by some adult educators to be a distinguishing feature of the adult learner (Brookfield 1998; Ecclestone 1996; Mezirow 1991).

For example I am currently teaching two groups of level 2 plastering students in theory and have found that each group reacts differently to how I am teaching them. The group I teach on Monday morning react better to group discussions or debates where as Fridays group reacted better to group activities but don’t seem to get involved so much in discussions as the Monday group. At first I thought it could have been the days and times they had been timetabled or that some of the students were shy so I decided to change tactics on the way I took the lesson and reflected on what went well or not on each lesson. I asked the students what they thought of the lesson and how they thought it could be improved in any way without agreement on what reflective practice is, it is difficult to decide on teaching learning strategies. Reflective practice may be a developmental learning process (Williamson 1997) may have different levels of attainment (Wellington 1996), and may be affected by a learner’s cognitive ability (James and Clarke 1994), willingness to engage in the process (Bright 1996; Haddock 1997), and orientation to change (Wellington...