Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice

Professional Reflective Practice is part of the Continuing Professional Development for teachers; these regulations are what the government introduced in 2007, for teachers and people teaching in the FE and in the skills sector. (2007 Regulations p.1 IFL), it set’s out to “move forward” the standards and requirement qualifications for teachers working within the FE sector and skills sector in education.
Reflective practice plays a big part of Continuing Professional Development (CPD), although it has been around for quite some time, it was only up until 2007, that teachers have had their own choice, whether to implement it or not within their teaching. Since the new regulations of 2007, it is now mandatory that every teacher / part-time teacher working within FE and the skills sector uses this practice (CPD) and produces a minimum set of hours every year proving this practice.

The essential point-the inner intent-that seems so seldom grasped even by teachers eager to embrace the current reforms is that in order to learn the sorts of things envisioned by reformers, students must think. In fact, such learning is almost exclusively a product or by-product of thinking.
(Thomson & Zeuli, 1999)
“Reflection” there are many ways in our everyday lives on how we reflect, whether that be a, conversation we had with someone close to us, or just sorting out a problem at work. Within the Continuing Professional Development for teachers there are many different, authors, definitions and theorist who have looked at the definition and the term “Reflection” and its association within the professional learning development of education and its practice within (HE) and (FE) education.
Reflection is a form of mental processing – like a form of thinking – that we use to fulfil a purpose or to achieve some anticipated outcome. It is applied to relatively complicated or unstructured ideas for which there is not an obvious solution and is largely based on the further processing of knowledge and understanding and possibly emotions that we already possess (based on Moon 1999):

Common sense reflecting, Moon explains that it is an everyday occurrence, as we go through life in general, day-to-day we generally reflect on our feelings and our emotions. Working as a teacher gives us many ways to reflect, the way we structure our lessons for students, the resources that we use, the tasks what we set out for the students, whether they have been effective or not.
Dealing with a disruptive lesson or student, on reflection we can look back and see were did things go wrong, we could question whether we could have done things differently. Common sense reflecting is quite vague in its sense, it lacks a deeper understanding of reflection, and how we can change things for the future.
Reflective thinking and its practice have been around since the early 19th century. Great philosophers like John Dewey who pushed and promoted a new way of reflective thinking across many new professional practitioners in medicine, law and education.
“While we cannot learn or be taught to think, we do have to learn how to think well, especially how to acquire the general habits of reflecting” (Dewey 1933,p35). In the early 1980’s another theorist