Tools and Social Criticality

Reflective practice depends on tools and on the broader stance the practitioner takes toward the work. The reflective journal is the most common tool, with several variations. The portfolio is another. Behind both sits a view that professional development is not a private affair but a social process that includes a willingness to challenge what schools take for granted.

Reflective journals: the most common tool

Reflective journals are the most frequently used tool of reflective practice. A journal involves teachers in self-assessment, collaborative critique, self-reflection, and goal setting.

A journal can take different forms.

1. It may become a shared dialogue with a colleague, exchanged and responded to over time.
2. It may be an individual journey of professional self-reflection, kept private.
3. It may be supported by a framework: a list of questions, a checklist, a structured template.

Different journal types support different kinds of work.

Reading-response journal

The teacher reads recommended content (a paper, a chapter, a case study) and then records responses in the journal. This connects experience to theory, and gives the teacher a place to test ideas from reading against their own practice.

Double-entry journal

The double-entry journal uses two columns or two pages. The left side records context: what happened, what was said, what was done. The right side records reflection: analysis, theory, proposed actions.

This format is based on Smith’s (1989) four-phase model: describe, inform, confront, reconstruct. The visual separation of context from reflection helps keep the two activities distinct.

Interactive journal

The teacher shares journal writings with an audience. The audience may be a single critical friend, a small group, or a wider professional community. The exchange provides encouragement and deepens reflection.

This format counters the isolation of solo journaling. It also produces accountability: a teacher who knows their journal will be read tends to write more carefully than one who knows it will not.

Dialogue journal

The dialogue journal supports the process of deconstructing and reconstructing experience. It helps teachers make sense of conceptual and theoretical understandings about teaching through ongoing exchange with another reader.

This format is close to the interactive journal but more sustained: a single colleague, often a mentor, engages with the journal across a long period.

Narrative journal

In a narrative journal, the teacher reflects on the values and beliefs that form the essence of teaching. The format uses storytelling: incidents, encounters, and characters from teaching life. Teachers can draw inferences from experience through the narrative form.

Practicum journal

The practicum journal is structured around guiding questions about teaching. It enables teachers to critique and modify their teaching deliberately. Self-assessment frameworks built into the journal help develop reflective skills over time.

There are many self-assessment models that teachers can use within a practicum journal. The right choice depends on what the teacher is working on.

A teacher does not have to pick one journal type for life. Different periods of teaching, different focuses for development, and different mentoring relationships call for different formats.

Portfolios

A portfolio is a collection of structured professional artefacts that demonstrate accumulated knowledge, skills, and practice. It may be paper-based or electronic.

A portfolio is not a scrapbook. The artefacts are selected and organised deliberately. The purpose is to show development over time and to give the teacher a structured way to see their own growth.

A teacher’s portfolio might include:

1. Sample lesson plans, with reflections on how they worked
2. Student work that demonstrates the effect of particular teaching choices
3. Observation notes from colleagues or mentors
4. Selected entries from the reflective journal
5. Records of professional development activities and what was learned from them
6. Action plans and the evaluation of their outcomes

Through the portfolio, teachers can portray higher-level cognitive thinking and self-reflective growth. The portfolio also serves as evidence in formal review processes, but its primary value is for the teacher’s own development.

A portfolio that is built up over years gives the teacher something none of their other reflection produces: a long view. Patterns visible across years are different from patterns visible across weeks. A teacher who can see five years of their own development at once tends to make better decisions about the next five years.

Social criticality

Reflective practice has a social dimension. It is not only about individual self-improvement. It also involves seeing the social conditions in which teaching happens and being willing to challenge them.

Being socially critical means starting with reality. It means seeing injustices and contradictions in the situation, and beginning to overturn that reality by reasserting the importance of learning.

Only when teachers take an active reflective stance are they able to challenge the dominant “factory” metaphor of the way many schools are conceived, organised, and enacted. The factory metaphor treats students as products on an assembly line, teachers as workers, and learning as output. This metaphor is everywhere in education systems, often unspoken.

A teacher who reflects only on technique, without ever questioning the metaphor, is reflecting inside the factory. A teacher who reflects on the metaphor itself opens up different possibilities.

In theorising practice and practising theory, teachers are able to see reflection as embedded deeply in their teaching, rather than something they do to it afterwards.

This is the integration the field aims at: theory and practice, reflection and action, individual development and social engagement.

The social basis of professional development

Professional development is based on two kinds of knowledge.

1. Received knowledge. The intellectual content of the profession: subject knowledge, pedagogical theory, research findings.
2. Experiential knowledge. Classroom experience PLUS reflection. Experience without reflection does not produce experiential knowledge in this sense; it produces only routine.

These two kinds of knowledge feed each other. Reflection on experience tests received knowledge. Received knowledge gives concepts to make sense of experience.

Dialogue and discussion are central to development. Articulation of ideas is crucial to shaping pedagogical thinking. Cooperative development involves another person.

This points to the social-constructivist view of professional development.

Social constructivism in professional development

Self-development in this view is based on social constructivism, which has several claims.

1. The mind is mediated by language. We think with the language we have. Without certain words, certain thoughts are hard to have.
2. Understanding is jointly constructed through dialogue. Real understanding is not built alone in a private mind. It is built in conversation, even when the conversation is internal.
3. Higher planes of understanding are reached through dialogues with other professionals. A teacher who only talks to themselves stays at one plane. A teacher who talks with mentors and critical friends reaches higher planes.
4. Knowledge is socially derived. What counts as professional knowledge has been built up by communities of practitioners over time.
5. Learning takes place in the zone of proximal development. This is Vygotsky’s idea: people learn most when they are working at the edge of what they can do alone, with support from a more experienced other.

The implication for reflective practice is direct. Reflection done entirely alone, without dialogue with other practitioners, hits a ceiling. Reflection that includes mentors, critical friends, and colleagues working in the zone of proximal development moves further.

Flashcard

What does social criticality mean in reflective practice, and what is the 'factory metaphor' it challenges?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Social criticality means starting with reality, seeing injustices, and challenging the factory metaphor of schools.

The factory metaphor treats students as products, teachers as workers, and learning as output on an assembly line. Social criticality involves taking an active reflective stance to challenge this metaphor and reassert the importance of learning. It moves reflection beyond technique into a willingness to question how teaching is conceived and organised.

What this means in practice

The reflective practitioner who takes social criticality and social constructivism seriously builds their practice differently from one who treats reflection as a private exercise.

Three concrete differences appear.

1. Dialogue is structural, not optional. A critical friend, mentor, or peer is not a nice extra; they are part of how reflection works.
2. The institution becomes data. The school’s assumptions, routines, and cultural patterns are part of what gets reflected on, not just personal practice.
3. Knowledge is treated as collective. The teacher contributes to a shared body of professional knowledge through their own reflection, not just consumes a body of knowledge produced elsewhere.

The process of reflection lets reflective practitioners develop an inquiry stance on their practice and construct their own knowledge base and their own professional skills. Teachers advance their effectiveness through reflective practice by challenging uncritically accepted assumptions, both their own and those of the institutions they work within.