The Process of reflection
There is a considerable literature providing advice to teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers and other professionals on how to reflect more effectively. Much of this writing is concerned with the various strategies practitioners can adopt to reflect upon their practice. In this section we will explore critically some of these techniques that are frequently used in development programmes for professional practitioners to promote and enhance skills in reflective practice.
The notion of reflection as a facet of professional practice and as a means of enhancing practice is widely accepted. Here reflection is on and about action. Subsequent to the action or experience, the practitioner engages in a reflective process whether through discussion or writing as a means of making sense of that experience.
Reflection is seen as a means of probing experiences not only in terms of the actions and behaviours of the individual practitioner but also deals with their motivations and intentions at the outset as well as their emotions during the experience being examined. This emphasis on the ‘full’ experience has led to the usage of a wide variety of genres being used to reflect including fiction, poetry, as well as descriptive and analytical styles of writing.
There is an increasing choice of texts (Bolton, 2001, Moon 1999b) that seek to provide practical guidance on the development of reflective practice. These ideas draw implicitly from some of the theoretical models we have examined in previous sections. For example, Bolton suggests, perhaps whimsically, that reflective practice is fostered through ‘the looking glass model’ of education. This model has three foundational ideas that echo back to Dewey’s ideas about reflective thinking and Schon’s construction of 'reflection-in-action'. These ideas are:
- certain uncertainty;
- serious playfulness;
- unquestioning questioning.
(Bolton, 2001:32)
Reflection does refer to an internal cognitive process, but often it is important to make such processes external, either through discussion or through writing. Writing, in particular, has been emphasised as an important process within reflective practice (Moon, 1999; Bolton, 2001).
There is then the question of what we mean by reflective writing. Hatton and Smith (1995), create an operational framework for writing that helps us to think about what we mean by reflective writing.
The operational framework put forward is a hierarchy whereby the focus on writing moves away from description of personal experiences to a more analytical stance that relates experiences to a socio-political context:
- Descriptive writing - In this type of writing there is no reflection, no analysis or justification, just a description of the circumstance or incident.
- Descriptive reflection - This type of writing focuses on contrasting your ideas with those of others: for example, Hatton and Smith think 'x'; in contrast I think 'y'.
- Dialogic reflection - Here the writer steps back and explores the events often in the form of a self-dialogue: for example, although I chose 'y', students had difficulty in responding to the approach. Perhaps this was due to factor A?
- Critical reflection - In this type of writing there is a realisation that cultural, historical, social factors affect the reflective process.
×
-
Project
Contact
This resource was developed as part of an Erasmus+ project, funded with support from the European Commission under grant agreement 2016-1-SE01-KA203-22064.
The project was a collaboration between:
- The University of Borås, Sweden
- The University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland
- The University of Alcalá, Spain
- Digital Connections, Scotland
This resource has been released under Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Disclaimer
If you would like more information on this resource please contact:
- Academic content – The University of the Highlands and Islands (www.uhi.ac.uk)
- Technical resource development – The University of the Highlands and Islands Educational Development Unit - EDU (edu@uhi.ac.uk)
Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 4.0. All images used under permission remain the copyright of the license holder.
Download a copy of this resource in PDF format.
You can also print individual pages by printing directly from the browser.
-
-
Project
