Reflective Practice and your e-portfolio
Morag Redford
What relection is?
How you use reflection?
Why you use reflection?
Where do you record reflection?
Viewing practice from a different angle
Making sense of our experience in order to build knowledge and understanding
Asking questions of our practice
Reflection is an active and purposeful process of exploration and discovery, often leading to unexpected outcomes. (Gray, 2007, p.496)
Steven Brookfield wrote about looking through lenses or frameworks as to what is happening in the classroom
Reflection must go beyond reporting and describing and beyond the individual to challenge the norms and as such it can be unsettling
Reflection requires the ‘active application of
concepts on practice’ (Marsick and Watkins, 1990:8).
It is NOT describing things in a diary.
questioning why?
questioning accepted routines, practices and rituals?
questioning values and assumptions?
the intention of being creative and constructive?
opportunity to confront complex issues of power and politics
Reflection: examining the justificaiton for one's beliefs. Explaining/demonstrating what you are doing and why?
Critical Reflection: making an assessment of the validity of one's assumptions, examining both sources and consequesnces
Critical self-reflection: re-assessing the way one has posed problems and one's orientation to perceiving, believing and acting
Journal?
Explore (often implicit) values and assumptions
Develop a reflexive dialogue with yourself
Develop critical awareness
Clarify thinking
Inform dialogues with others
Make sense of reading and unexamined ideas
Making sense of what has occurred
It allows you to explore things in greater depth
It connects your experience and allows you to relate this to yoru reading
It allows you to make sense of your experiences
...a powerful tool to support reflection. (Forde at al. 2009)
When written down, a ‘text’ is created which enables teachers to re-examine fundamental issues associated with teaching and learning and the contexts which mould it.” (Ghaye & Ghaye 1998: 81)
Questions of time, scale, uncertainty, politics and sustainability
Critical incidence analysis Practical, diagnostic, reflective, critical (Tripp, 1993)
When written down, a ‘text’ is created which enables teachers to re-examine fundamental issues associated with teaching and learning and the contexts which mould it. (Ghaye and Ghaye 1998, p. 81).
You are gathering evidence.
What happened? Who was involved? How did you feel? How do you think others felt? Then explore by playing devil's advocate: arguing the opposite of what you think.
Explorative and critical analysis stage is the fifth stage.