Introduction to reflective practice in education
Introduction to reflective practice in education
As clinical educators, you’re bringing a wealth of experience from healthcare practice into higher education. One of the most important tools you’ll use throughout this programme, and in your ongoing development, is reflective practice.
Reflection will be an essential part of your apprenticeship portfolio and will play a key role in helping you meet the academic and professional expectations of the programme. You’ll be encouraged to reflect regularly on your teaching practice and use these reflections to set meaningful goals, document your learning, make informed changes to your practice, and provide clear evidence of your progress across the Knowledge, Skills, Values and Behaviours (KSVBs).
Importantly, you are not expected to be an expert reflective writer from the outset. The programme is designed to support you in building confidence and developing your reflective voice over time.
What is reflective practice?
Reflective practice is the process of thinking critically about your experiences in order to learn from them and improve your future practice. In an educational context, it means regularly pausing to consider:
- What went well in a teaching session?
- What could have been more effective?
- How did your actions affect learners?
- What might you do differently next time?
It’s a purposeful, structured way of learning from your own experience - something you may already do informally in your clinical work.
Why is reflection important in education?
In teaching, as in clinical practice, we rarely get everything right the first time. Reflective practice allows us to:
- Understand our learners’ needs more deeply
- Adapt and improve our teaching techniques
- Develop a more student-centred approach
- Build confidence and self-awareness
- Link theory to practice in meaningful ways
Throughout the apprenticeship, reflection will help you engage more deeply with the KSVBs expected of academic professionals.
We will explore more about reflective practice during our in-person teaching sessions, but to get started, here are a few foundational authors and models to be aware of:
- Donald Schön (1983) – Introduced the idea of the “reflective practitioner.” He described two key types of reflection:
- Reflection-in-action: thinking on your feet during a teaching or clinical session
- Reflection-on-action: thinking back after the event to learn from it
- Graham Gibbs (1988) – Developed the Gibbs Reflective Cycle, a simple structure for guiding reflection through six stages:
- Description
- Feelings
- Evaluation
- Analysis
- Conclusion
- Action Plan
This model is particularly useful for those new to structured reflection and will be introduced more formally in your programme.
- Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (1984) – A four-stage learning model based on experience:
- Concrete Experience
- Reflective Observation
- Abstract Conceptualisation
- Active Experimentation
This links reflection directly to the important concepts of learning and behaviour change.
Activity: Getting started
- Try writing a short reflection after your next teaching or supervision session (you may wish to use one of the suggested frameworks above)
- Use questions like:
- What did I hope would happen?
- What actually happened?
- What did I learn from it?
- Don’t focus only on what went wrong - celebrate what went well too!
We’ll explore more reflection tools and techniques as the programme progresses. For now, the most important step is simply to begin!
References
Schön, D.A., 2017. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Routledge.
Gibbs, G., 1988. Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit.
Kolb, D.A., 1984. Experience as the source of learning and development. Upper Sadle River: Prentice Hall.
