Reflective practice in context: Education
“Learning new techniques for teaching is like the fish that provides a meal for today; reflective practice is the net that provides the meal for the rest of one’s life.”
– John Biggs
What is reflective practice in education?
Good teachers don’t only assess their students – they also reflect on their own skills, setbacks, and successes to continually improve their teaching practice. Reflective practice in education is an intentional process in which teachers reflect on, analyse, and evaluate their teaching practice, including things like planning, teaching methods, behaviour management strategies, learning activities, and interactions with students and parents. These reflections can take place individually, or through collaboration with other teachers or mentors. They might be organised and formally documented or just a casual chat with personal notes. After the process has taken place, in whatever form, teachers will consider how their practice can be improved upon, based on their reflections.
Reflective practice in education starts from a university student’s journey as a pre-service teacher and ideally continues until they leave the profession. When teachers reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t, it enables them to act intentionally to improve the learning experience for their students.
Below are some examples of activities within education that involve reflective thought and can all be considered part of an educator’s reflective practice.
- Keeping a reflective journal
- Writing reflective essays on the application of educational theories in the classroom
- Reflecting on feedback from students or observation notes
- Discussing lessons and progress with mentors and colleagues
- Participating in communities of practice with peers in education
- Keeping notes on how lessons went and using them to develop improved versions of lesson plans and courses
- Writing reflections on professional development sessions such as internal workshops or international conferences
- Writing compliance documents on the classroom dynamic and interactions with students and their parents
- Writing critical incident reports on student behaviour and classroom events
- Planning and writing academic papers on education
- Observing and mentoring early-career teachers
Earlier in this chapter we covered reflective thinking and practice in general and reflective writing.
Why is it important?
At first, reflection might not seem necessary when you’re gaining experience and adapting in the moment. However, as time passes and you teach more classes, it becomes challenging to remember all the valuable lessons you’ve learnt along the way. Keeping a record of your reflections can help your future lesson planning, and having a collection of reflections to draw from is incredibly useful, especially when it comes to putting together a teaching portfolio or discussing professional growth in interviews.
Reflective practice provides a means for teachers to improve their practice to effectively meet the learning needs of their students. In Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (1995), Brookfield succinctly describes the advantages of reflective practice to teachers as:
- It helps teachers to take informed actions that can be justified and explained to others and that can be used to guide further action.
- It allows teachers to adjust and respond to issues.
- It helps teachers to become aware of their underlying beliefs and assumptions about learning and teaching.
- It helps teachers promote a positive learning environment.
- It allows teachers to consciously develop a repertoire of relevant and context-specific strategies and techniques.
- It helps teachers locate their teaching in the broader institutional, social and political context and to appreciate that many factors influence student learning.
© State of New South Wales (Department of Education), unless otherwise attributed, ‘Reflective practice‘ is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Read the scenario below to see an example of the importance and benefit of reflective practice.
A pre-service teacher develops a game to play with her year nine geography students to learn and practice key vocabulary. She spends hours preparing quiz questions and making sure all the learning content is valuable. On the day of the lesson, however, things don’t go to plan. The students are rowdy and don’t take the activity seriously, and the pre-service teacher ends the game early, feeling that the class has descended into chaos.
She has to teach the other year nine group two days from now, and she had been planning to just repeat the same lesson with a few tweaks, but now it will have to be completely changed. This is the perfect time for some reflection, analysis, and evaluation.
Spend a moment considering how reflecting on this lesson might be useful for the pre-service teacher. Then, expand the sections below to see how the next lesson goes depending on whether she reflects or not.
Case study
Gain a better understanding of how you will use reflective practice throughout your teaching career, by exploring the case study below.
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Now that you’ve learnt about reflective practice and explored its use in a teacher’s career, why not get started with your own reflections on your personal learning experiences?
In this useful video from Queensland College of Teachers, graduate teachers and their mentors talk about the journey to becoming fully registered teachers and the role that reflective practice plays.
Check out this video from ACECQA to learn about critical reflection in practice in Early Childhood Education.
As you have learnt, reflective practice is an integral part of studying and working in education, and a skill that you should focus on developing early in your career — and the information on this page is a great place to start.
Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does (2nd ed.) Berkshire: SRHE & Open University Press.
Queensland College of Teachers. (2019). Reflecting on practice in completing the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPOm3ZYngDo&t=3s
ACECQA. (2019). Critical reflection in practice [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqjEY-kJFjo
