The process of reflection helps people learn.
Used by instructors, reflective practice allows you to take a systemic, intentional approach to improving the way you facilitate learning.
Why engage in reflective practice
Engaging in reflective practice helps you evaluate what you're doing and whether it's effective. It shows you're willing to consider alternative strategies and tactics for teaching and learning.
You can apply reflective practice to any aspect of teaching — a program, a course, an approach to a topic, an activity or way to help students learn a specific skill.
Reflective practice helps you to:
- hypothesize about different ways to make a change
- implement a change
- analyze the impact of the change to determine its effectiveness
- reflect on the reasons behind decisions you make in your profession
Most instructors engage in reflective practice naturally. They assess their work and consider ways to change and improve. The reflective practice described below allows you to reflect with intention and engage in formal activities to help you implement change.
Stages of reflective practice
Reflective practice is a cycle with five main stages. You can approach them in any order and choose to focus only on the stages that fit best with your goals.
At each stage, you'll analyze the approach you took and reflect on the details — the what, why, how and when.
Ideally the process of going through these stages begins as soon as possible after the activity, course or program.
We've included prompts to guide you through each stage of reflective practice:
1. Motivation
- Describe the focus of your reflective practice. Are you looking at a specific topic or learning activity? A comment from a learner evaluation?
- Provide context for your focus.
- What is your motivation in wanting to bring about a change to this focus? Is something making you feel dissatisfied? What are the implications of changing this focus? Who will feel these implications?
2. Action plan
- Create an action plan that describes the change you'd like to make.
- Indicate why you've chosen this course of action. List any resources/research/advice from others that have guided the direction you're taking.
- Describe when and how the change will be implemented.
3. Anticipated results
- What is the anticipated result of this change?
- Why do you anticipate that result?
- What is your response to this?
4. Implementation
- Try out the new approach.
- Describe what happened.
- Record your observations.
5. Results
- Describe the results of the new approach. Did everything you anticipate happen? Were there surprises, good or bad?
- What would you do differently next time? What aspects of the change should be adopted or rejected?
- Draw conclusions on what you've observed.
- Write next steps.