Naming and Overcoming Barriers
Internal vs external barriers
| Internal (from inside the learner) | External (from outside) |
|---|---|
| Previous negative experiences | Other people |
| Accepted assumptions about ability | The learning environment |
| What learning can take place | The teacher’s wider personal situation |
| Lack of awareness of one’s assumptions | Social forces (stereotyping, cultural expectations, classism) |
| The teacher’s emotional state | |
| Established patterns of behavior |
Four specific barriers Boud singles out
- Emotions and feelings : pain and discomfort make us avoid affective reflection
- Personal awareness : if you do not see the barrier, you cannot work on it
- The environment : uncomfortable spaces disturb careful reflection
- Keeping a journal : academic culture devalues personal experience
The key process for overcoming barriers
- Acknowledge the barrier exists
- Name it clearly; the more clearly you name it, the more easily you can work with it
- Use a group of fellow practitioners; their experience is invaluable
- Commit to the group; mutual support, trust, and challenge keep the work alive
- Use effective facilitation to create conditions for authentic dialogue
A warning about facilitators
The facilitator should not “run mindlessly giving answers and solving problems.” Their role is to create the conditions for the group to do its own thinking.
When Boud first formulated his model in 1985, barriers to reflection were not part of the picture. By 1993, after his own experience of being blocked, barriers had become a separate piece of the theory. The work names what gets in the way and offers a process for working through it.
Where barriers come from
Boud classifies barriers as internal or external, based on their origin in relation to the practitioner.
Internal barriers
Internal barriers come from within the learner.
Previous negative experiences. A teacher who has been criticised harshly for previous reflection writing may avoid the work in the future.
Accepted presuppositions about what the learner can do. A teacher who believes they are not the type of person who reflects has already opted out.
What learning can take place. A teacher who believes “real” learning happens only through formal study may discount the learning that comes from reflecting on classroom experience.
A lack of awareness of one’s assumptions. This is the deepest internal barrier. If you cannot see the assumption, you cannot examine it.
The emotional state of the teacher. Tiredness, anxiety, and grief all reduce the capacity for reflection. A teacher under acute personal stress will struggle to do deep reflective work, regardless of skill.
Established patterns of behavior. Habits set up in earlier years persist even when the teacher consciously wants to change. The pattern keeps running.
External barriers
External barriers come from outside the practitioner.
People. Colleagues, administrators, family members, students. People who do not take reflection seriously can drain energy from the practitioner who does.
The learning environment. A staff room with no quiet space, a school with no protected time, a culture that mocks “academic” approaches.
The wider personal situation. Family responsibilities, financial pressure, health concerns. Reflection takes mental space that other pressures fill up.
Social forces. Stereotyping, cultural expectations, classism, and other social patterns shape what is considered normal and acceptable. A teacher whose reflection touches sensitive social ground may face pressure to stop.
Boud did not produce a tight analysis of these. In his 1993 text he brainstormed a list of eighteen barriers. The list is illustrative rather than definitive. The point is that barriers are real and varied.
Four specific barriers worth naming
Four barriers get singled out in Boud’s later writing because of how they show up in everyday teacher reflection.
1. Emotions and feelings
In stage 2 of his model, Boud stresses the importance of working with the feelings we have. But much valuable learning comes from situations we would never have chosen to experience, if we had known what was coming.
The significance is that the reflective practitioner may not want to engage fully with the affective elements of reflection. Engaging can produce anxiety, pain, and discomfort. A teacher whose hardest moment of the year was a meeting with a parent of a struggling child may quietly avoid reflecting on it. The avoidance is rational. The cost is the learning that did not happen.
2. Personal awareness
This, in Boud’s view, is the most important barrier. If we are not personally aware that a barrier exists, then how can we possibly seek to overcome it?
This shows up in two specific patterns.
A teacher may not see the benefit of formally reflecting. “It was not in my nature.” “I am too practical for things like that.” The barrier is not skill; it is the belief that the work does not apply.
A teacher may not feel “able” or “good enough” to undertake critical reflection. The literature calls this “imposter ship.” The teacher reads about Schon, Boud, Gibbs, and Johns and concludes they are not the kind of person who can do this. The barrier is confidence, not capability.
3. The environment
Any environment can be disturbing to careful reflection if it is not comfortable for the reflective practitioner. A noisy staff room, an open-plan office, a home with constant interruptions, a school with no time blocked off for reflection. The work needs space.
Pakistani schools often have weak environmental support for reflection. Staff rooms double as everything from lunch space to printer station. Quiet time is rare. A teacher who wants to reflect has to find or build the conditions, often outside school.
4. Keeping a journal
A journal is a recognised method of evaluating personal experience by reflecting on it. But it is not easy to pick up a pen and start writing. Writing about personal experience can be profoundly difficult.
Boud suggests one reason. The culture of academic and professional writing has long devalued personal experience in the quest for objectivity and generality. A teacher trained in this culture has internalised the message that personal writing is not serious. Sitting down to write personally produces resistance.
Two barriers therefore restrict personal writing: previous experience of being told personal writing does not count, and the wider tradition of academic writing. Boud refers to the fact that the real battleground for working with barriers is the teacher.
The process of overcoming barriers
Boud identifies a process for overcoming barriers.
Acknowledge that barriers exist
The first step is honesty. A teacher who pretends there are no barriers cannot work on any of them. Naming the barriers, even silently, opens the possibility of addressing them.
Naming as a landmark
An important landmark is what Boud calls naming. The more clearly we can understand barriers, the more easily we can work with them. A vague sense of “I do not feel like writing today” becomes a workable problem when it is named as “I am avoiding writing about this incident because the feelings are still raw.”
The naming does not solve the barrier. It makes the barrier addressable.
Working with a group
Reflective practitioners are able to learn from a group, since their experience of using reflection in practice is invaluable. Other teachers have faced the same barriers. Their workarounds are useful data.
Teachers working together can motivate each other and help sustain interest. The group becomes part of the reflective process.
Commitment to the group
The reflective practitioner can commit to the group because the group becomes an invaluable part of the reflective process. The phrase Boud uses is that we need, as learners, appropriate support, trust, and challenge from others.
Three words matter. Support is encouragement and validation. Trust is the safety to share difficulties without judgment. Challenge is the willingness to push each other when the reflection is staying shallow.
A group that has only support produces warm but shallow reflection. A group that has only challenge can become harsh. A group that holds support, trust, and challenge in balance produces the conditions for serious work.
Effective facilitation
Boud refers to the importance of effective facilitation. A skilled facilitator helps the group hold the three qualities together.
The warning Boud gives is that the facilitator should resist the temptation of running around mindlessly giving answers and solving problems. The facilitator’s role is to create conditions in which authentic dialogue and communicative discourse can occur. They are not the answer-giver. They are the condition-setter.
A facilitator who solves problems for the group has taken away the work that produces learning.
Naming the barrier clearly
The more clearly we understand a barrier, the more easily we can work with it. Naming does not solve the barrier; it makes it addressable. Acknowledgment that barriers exist comes first; naming follows; then a group of fellow practitioners helps work through them with support, trust, and challenge.
Why this layer of the model matters
A teacher who reads only the early Boud material gets a tidy three-stage model that may not survive contact with real teaching. A teacher who reads the later barrier material gets a more honest picture: reflection is hard, blocked by both internal and external forces, and best supported by community.
The honesty is part of what makes the later Boud useful. The model does not promise easy progress. It names the difficulty and offers a working process for moving through it.