Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s thoughts, emotions, actions, decisions, assumptions, and professional experiences so as to take a critical stance or attitude towards improving one’s own practice, understanding, judgment, and future actions, while challenging automatic reactions and assumptions and engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning. According to one definition it involves "paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight". A key rationale for reflection is that deliberate reflection on experience is essential for engaging in meaningful action. Reflective practice can be an important tool in practice-based professional learning settings where people learn from their own professional experiences, rather than from formal learning or knowledge transfer. Although reflection alone is not fully reliable, because insight, introspection, and self-appraisal can be distorted by cognitive biases, reflective practice can still be a major source of professional development when combined with critical analysis, feedback, and evidence-based knowledge. It is also an important way to bring together theory and practice; through reflection one is able to see and label forms of thought and theory within the context of one's work. Reflecting throughout one’s practice is taking a conscious look at emotions, experiences, actions, and responses, and using that information to develop new meaning, add to one’s existing knowledge base, and reach a higher level of understanding.
History and background
Donald Schön's 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner introduced concepts such as reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action which explain how professionals meet the challenges of their work with a kind of improvisation that is improved through practice. However, the concepts underlying reflective practice are much older. For German philosopher Immanuel Kant, "reflective judgments" (German: reflektierende Urteilskraft) play a key role in empirical scientific enquiry and the construction of systematic scientific theories by making it possible to comprehend nature as lawlike. Earlier in the 20th century, John Dewey was among the first to write about reflective practice with his exploration of experience, interaction and reflection. Soon thereafter, other researchers such as Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget were developing relevant theories of human learning and development. Some scholars have claimed to find precursors of reflective practice in ancient texts such as Buddhist teachings and the Meditations of Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Central to the development of reflective theory was interest in the integration of theory and practice, the cyclic pattern of experience and the conscious application of lessons learned from experience. Since the 1970s, there has been growing literature and focus around experiential learning and the development and application of reflective practice. As adult education professor David Boud and his colleagues explained: "Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. It is this working with experience that is important in learning." When a person is experiencing something, he or she may be implicitly learning; however, it can be difficult to put emotions, events, and thoughts into a coherent sequence of events. When a person rethinks or retells events, it is possible to categorize events, emotions, ideas, etc., and to compare the intended purpose of a past action with the results of the action. Stepping back from the action permits critical reflection on a sequence of events. The emergence in more recent years of blogging has been seen as another form of reflection on experience in a technological age.
Models Many models of reflective practice have been created to guide reasoning about action. However, they are not without their criticisms, and need to be understood within the context within which they were written.
Borton 1970
Terry Borton's 1970 book Reach, Touch, and Teach popularized a simple learning cycle inspired by Gestalt therapy composed of three questions which ask the practitioner: What, So what, and Now what? Through this analysis, a description of a situation is given which then leads into the scrutiny of the situation and the construction of knowledge that has been learnt through the experience. Subsequently, practitioners reflect on ways in which they can personally improve and the consequences of their response to the experience. Borton's model was later adapted by practitioners outside the field of education, such as the field of nursing and the helping professions.
Kolb and Fry 1975
Learning theorist David A. Kolb was highly influenced by the earlier research conducted by John Dewey and Jean Piaget. Kolb's reflective model, which also draws from the works of Kurt Lewin, highlights the concept of experiential learning and is centered on the transformation of information into knowledge. This takes place after a situation has occurred, and entails a practitioner reflecting on the experience, gaining a general understanding of the concepts encountered during the experience, and then testing these general understandings in a new situation. In this way, the knowledge that is formed from a situation is continuously applied and reapplied, building on a practitioner's prior experiences and knowledge.
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