Critiques of Reflective Practice

Reflective practice has been adopted in teaching, nursing, social work, and management training. Its spread has produced both fans and critics. The honest list of critiques sits in the literature, and a reflective teacher should know it. The critiques are not reasons to abandon reflection. They are warnings about the ways reflection can fail when used carelessly.

Cultural and personal risks

Brookfield (1994, 1995) was an early supporter of reflective practice and an honest critic of it. He noted that not every teacher who tries reflection ends up feeling empowered. Some end up feeling exposed, judged, or worn down by it. Busy and overstretched professionals often find reflection taxing. The result is bland, mechanical, routinised reflection done without much thought. The activity continues, but its purpose is gone.

Ash (2002, cited in Hobbs 2007) added that some teachers actively choose not to reflect critically. They prefer to fall back on preconceived ideas about how they and their students should behave in class. The choice to not reflect is itself a stance, and it is a common one in busy schools.

In a Pakistani context, where teaching loads are high and class sizes are large, this is a real risk. Reflection that feels like an extra burden tends to either be skipped or be done as paperwork.

Mechanical reflection

Boud and Walker (1998, p. 193) put the second critique sharply: reflection can be turned into a recipe, a series of checklists worked through in a mechanical fashion without regard to the teacher’s own uncertainties, questions, and meanings. The model becomes the master. The teacher just fills in the blanks.

A teacher who follows Gibbs’s six stages exactly without ever questioning whether they fit the situation is doing exactly this. The model is supposed to support thinking. When it replaces thinking, the practice is hollow.

The fix is to use a model as scaffolding, not as a script. The model holds your thinking while you do the work. When you no longer need the scaffold, you let it go.

Ethical concerns

Reflective writing often involves real students, real colleagues, and real institutions. Several ethical questions follow.

1. Confidentiality. When you write about a student’s mistake or a colleague’s behaviour, who else will read it?
2. Right to privacy. Are the people in your reflection aware that they are being written about?
3. Informed consent. If reflective writing is shared (with a mentor, in training), have the people involved agreed to be part of the data?
4. Professional relationships. Reflection that makes its way back to the people it discusses can damage trust.

A reflective teacher should anonymise people in their writing, store reflective journals carefully, and think before sharing.

A second risk is internal. Quinn (1988, 2000) noted that reflection can involve constant striving for self-improvement. Done without limits, this slides into self-disapproval and self-rejection. If a teacher reads “critical” as “negative”, they can end up in an unduly harsh frame of mind. Reflection should sharpen practice, not produce a quietly miserable teacher.

Pedagogical concerns

Two pedagogical worries get raised most often.

Developmental readiness

Critical reflection asks the teacher to examine values and assumptions. Some teachers are not yet ready to do this. The evidence suggests that novices, by definition lacking practical mastery, tend to follow models mechanically. Reliance on rigid models lessens with experience. Asking a first-year teacher to do deep critical reflection before they have stable classroom routines is asking too much.

This is not an insult to new teachers. It is a recognition of stages. A reasonable training programme starts new teachers on dialogic reflection over specific lessons and brings critical reflection in once the basics are settled.

Forced reflection

When reflection is required by an institution, with appraisal attached, the result is often superficial, strategic, and guarded. Teachers reflect on what they think the appraiser wants to see. Honest, critical self-examination becomes risky, because anything that admits weakness can be used against them.

The fix is at the system level. Reflection that counts toward appraisal should be separated from reflection done for personal development. Mixing the two ruins the second one.

Professional concerns

Reflective practice done badly does worse than nothing. Three things go wrong.

1. Rationalisation. Reflection becomes a way of justifying existing practice instead of changing it. The teacher describes the lesson, concludes it was fine, and continues.
2. Reinforcing prejudice. Without critical thinking, reflection can confirm cultural assumptions the teacher already held. A teacher who believes “this group of students never works hard” can produce a reflective journal full of evidence for that belief.
3. Shifting responsibility. Reflective practice at the level of the individual teacher can let an institution off the hook. If a school is under-resourced or poorly led, asking each teacher to “reflect” puts the burden on people who cannot fix the system.

These professional concerns cut against the picture of reflection as automatically good. Reflection done well helps. Reflection done badly can confirm prejudice and let institutions avoid responsibility.

Conceptual concerns

The last group of critiques is about the term itself. Practitioners often pick up models of reflection in piecemeal, reductionist ways. Ideas are transplanted across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries with little care, and the ideas get distorted on the way. Finlay (2003) noted that reflection can be understood in many different ways depending on the goal of the exercise and the methodological tradition behind it.

Some writers treat reflection as a personal, almost confessional account. Others use it to deconstruct socially situated action. The two uses are very different even though they share a name. A teacher reading the word “reflection” in a textbook should pause and ask which version the writer means.

Flashcard

Why does forced, appraisal-linked reflection often fail?

Tap to reveal

Answer

It produces guarded, strategic reflection rather than honest self-examination

When honest self-criticism can be used against the teacher in appraisal, the teacher reflects on what the appraiser wants to see, not on what is actually going wrong. The result is paperwork that looks like reflection but does not change practice.

What to do with these critiques

The critiques do not invalidate reflective practice. They make a few practical demands.

1. Treat models as scaffolding, not as a script.
2. Watch for ethical risks in writing about students and colleagues.
3. Match the depth of reflection to the teacher’s stage.
4. Keep appraisal and personal reflection separate.
5. Ask the conceptual question: which version of reflection are you actually doing?

A teacher who reads the critiques first usually does better reflection than one who reads only the enthusiastic introductions.