Finding the time to think about how your work is going and what you have learnt from your experiences has long been part of good teaching practice. Recently, however, the importance of this kind of professional reflection has been highlighted by policy developments, with the DfEE in 2001 stating, “We want to encourage teachers, as reflective practitioners, to think about what they do well, to reflect on what they could share with colleagues, as well as identifying their own learning needs.” So, how does this reflection work? How do you go beyond simple description towards the kind of deep reflection, from which learning can be achieved? In order to establish answers to these questions, we will now examine three accounts of the same learning episode, ‘The Presentation’, written by Marianne, before discussing how reflection can help whilst studying for a PGCE programme.
The first account of ‘The Presentation’ is an example of an account that contains mostly simple description of what actually happened. This description includes a background story to the event itself, which puts the episode into a context. However, it also adds much unnecessary information irrelevant to any aspects that might require reflection. This first account also contains descriptions of Marianne’s feelings and is concluded with a short list of improvements suggested by her boss so that Marianne can improve her performance for her next presentation. The list of suggested improvements takes the account from being purely descriptive to reflective, although the reflection here cannot be said to be deep, as it is not the result of Marianne’s own reflection but, rather, someone else’s.
In the second account of ‘The Presentation’ there is still a lot of description, though Marianne now becomes more reflective by weaving more analytical and reflective thoughts into her writing, and considers the motives behind her actions. There is further description still in the second account – at no point in...