Nt1330 3.1

Teaching and learning is a two-way process and as teachers we can gain an extraordinary amount by listening to feedback from others, by evaluating our own performance regularly and by reflecting on our own practice. We should see areas for development not as negative features of our own teaching but as an opportunity to make teaching even more effective. It is particularly important to listen to our learners – their voice must be heard and their comments taken account of at all levels in an organisation.

Encouraging a supervisee to use reflection on their own practise will ensure the supervisee can bring to supervision a practise that will help them identify problems or solutions to the problem.

The ability to reflect on one’s own practice is crucial because you can evaluate your effectiveness and assess how well you think you are doing and identify any areas that need improvement or development.

Reflecting on work activities is an important way to develop knowledge, skills and practice, because, it gives you a better understanding of what children like to do, and also like to learn.

Reflective practice can be used by workers to enhance their performance and practice at work.

Reflective practice provides space for us individuals in order to develop a positive attitude towards the uncertainty. Anzul and Ely (1988:27) expands on the understanding of reflective practice with ‘The reflective practitioner makes a space. And while that space gives no guarantees, it allows us to think again, to do again, and slowly to breach the stagnant moat between what most of us do and what most of us know we should do’.

Reflective practice is a method in which a person critically analyzes and evaluates his actions and reactions and tries to improve his performance.

The ability to become reflective in practice has become a necessary skill for health professionals. This is to ensure that health professionals are continuing with their daily learning and improving their practice. Reflective practice plays a big part in healthcare today and is becoming increasingly noticed.

Looking at Reflective Practice as a stand-alone discipline for self and system improvement was an enlightening process. I have worked with teams to critical dissect a situation, to develop a plan for the next time an incident occurs, to understand a student’s behavior and in efforts to build stronger teams. I have come home from a social situation and run the scenario through my mind trying to figure out what went well and what did not. However, to purposefully and systematically unpack and repack an experience with the goal of improving one’s practice is far more powerful then exercises I have done in the past.

On the other hand reflective practice can be seen as the central aspect of the teaching and learning process. Boyd and Fayles (1983:1) defined reflective practice as, “learning is the process of internally examining and exploring an issue of concern, triggered by an experience, which creates and clarifies meaning in terms of self, and which results in a changed conceptual perspective.” Schon believes that there are two aspects to reflective practice: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Schon, D. A. (1983), [cited in

This stage is how all learning is acquired, when children are beginning to link coordination and thinking skills. A one-year-old may begin to experience with rolling a ball on the floor, his senses are active from touching the ball, and seeing the ball roll away from him. This experimentation with objects and how he can make things happen depicts common interactions with the physical world, which continues to compound as language and social skills continue to develop and thinking merges from pictures into words. Practicing and repetition of learned motor skills and thinking skills allow the child to keep learned behaviors and outcome into the transition of curiosity and learning. When a teacher uses the observation and reflection process the repetition and new learning goals can be implemented. Journaling or keeping notes, even photo journaling can help an instructor be aware of what was effective in the teaching or

To conclude our learning, from the reflections we have made individually, we should keep these in mind within future forms of professional practice, for example, when we attend an interview in later life. Finally, using active experimentation in order to plan for the future and, in effect, practice our reflections and what we have learnt from them to successfully better ourselves professionally (Davies, C, unknown)

According to Jasper (2013), Reflective practise is where we learn by looking back at events and examining them in a different way, which enable us to make a plan to improve the outcome if the event happens again. As health care professionals we must write reflectively as it allows us to examine our practise and ensure that we are treating patients in the correct manner according to our treatment protocols.

After understanding the perspectives of teacher on teaching and learning outcome its important to understand what reflective practices are and how it contributes to continuous teacher’s professional development. The reflective approach draws on Dewey’s (1993) and Schon’s work (1983,1987) where Dewey defined reflection as active persistent and careful consideration of beliefs. He referred to reflection as thought from puzzlement felt in direct experiences which is an important aspect of learning from experience. Reflective thinking helps practitioners to act in intentional and deliberative ways rather than in a blind and impulsive manner. Reflective practices are usually a process of metacognition which works on ones existing knowledge and helps assist in problem solving. Therefore, how people think and reflect on their prior experiences will help in influencing their professional

Practice as a result of undertaking the module. I aim to develop the theory in these three ways. Firstly I have been diagnostically assessing my students in a more formal way using questionnaires at different stages in the semester, this is to get to know the learners, to improve my role as a teacher, to enable me to write session plans based on them and to write differentiation into the sessions.