What is reflective practice?

It means thinking about and learning from what happens in your classroom.

Reflecting on what you do, why and how you do it, what the effects on your learners, helps you to identify and take action on areas for improvement.

First, think about what went well or did not go well in a lesson.

Think about the reasons why things went well. Think about how you can improve on things which didn't go well.

Did I achieve my goals?

What did my students learn?

Were the materials helpful?

Did the activities motivate the students?

Did my students enjoy the lesson?

How do I know lesson was successful?

What changes will I make if I teach this lesson again?

1-Provide different opportunities for yourself to reflect through a range of different activities.

2-Build in some ground rules to the process and into each activity.

3-Make provisions for four different kinds of time.

4-Provide external input for enriched reflection.

5-Provide four low affective states.

1-Group Discussions: These groups can simply be of your teacher colleagues who come together for regular meetings to reflect on your work.

2-Observation: It can be carried alone, as in self-observation, in pairs observing each other's class.

3-Journal Writing: Journal writing can also be carried out alone in the form of a diary, in pairs writing to and for each other, in the group writing to and for each other.

4-Critical friends : Colleagues can engage each other in systematic reflection and thus direct each other's professional self-development.

Critical friends can stimulate, clarify, and extend thinking and feel account for their own growth and their peers' growth.

2- Negotiated ground rule You should adopt a flexible approach towards applying each of the activities.

This flexibility provides opportunities for the group to progress at its own pace, in a way that best suits each individual's own needs. However, that should not be too flexible to drift away.

Suggestions three through five are actually ground rules that can be built in to the activity.

For example, who will chair the meetings of our development discussion?

This chairperson should also be willing to use his/her position to protect and encourage the free expression of views.

For observations, certain understandings need to be negotiated ahead of time.

For example, what are the responsibilities of the observer?

Will the class be videotaped? Is intervention possible or desirable in class? What is to be observed and how?

For Journal Writing, it was found that the number of entries did not really influence the level of critical reflection.

Some teachers write about their personal life in their journals. Therefore, a set of guidelines needs to be negotiated to ensure deeper, critical level of reflection.

Groups and pairs should negotiate the number of frequency of entries and the type of entries.

The following questions may help a writer started. Describe what you do with no judgment.

Why do you do it? Should you continue to do or change it? What do others do?

There must be an element of trust and openness in order to avoid putting emphasis on the critical while overlooking the friend.

The friend can provide a set of eyes that both support and challenge us to get at deeper reflections of our teaching.

All the above activities can not be accomplished quickly. They take time.

Individual A certain level of commitment by individual participants in terms of time should be negotiated by the group at the start of the process.

Activity Associated with time each participant has to give the project the time that should be spent on each activity and not more because it exhausts everyone.

Time for the observation process is concerned with the number of the observations. The number of times a class can be observed should be negotiated by each group.

The Journal also needs time: time to write and time to read. Group members need to read each other's journal at the beginning of each group meeting.

Development: Another aspect of time that is important for teacher self development groups is the time it takes to develop.

There are two stages a reflective teacher may go through. The first is what we may call the "getting to know you" and the second stage is the reflective stage.

Period of Reflection The period of time it takes to become reflective is connected to the time frame for the project as a whole.

Reflection takes time so the reflective period should be long rather than short, Otherwise, it will be time wasted.

External input: Teacher education, whether pre- service or in-service, requires input from various experiences, other people's observations and reflection, and from other peoples' experiments, and from theories learned from research and the literature.

Individuals and groups in a process of professional self- development need to be challenged by external input for a more enriched reflection.

A low affective state Change in the practice of teaching is not easy but painful and long. There will be a certain level of anxiety.

Therefore, a non-threatening environment should be fostered in the group by individuals themselves. Ways of establishing low anxiety can be incorporated, such as emphasizing description and observation over judgment.