What Professionals Reflect On
Five layers worth reflecting on
- Philosophy. Your perceptions of children, parents, families, and yourself as a professional.
- Values and beliefs. What you believe is right and how it shapes decisions.
- Practice. What you actually do in class, week by week.
- Practices taken for granted. The routines you no longer notice.
- Yourself. Your role, your prejudices, your professional identity.
Sample questions for each layer
| Layer | A useful question |
|---|---|
| Philosophy | Whose voice is heard in my classroom? |
| Values | What do I think a “good student” looks like, and where did that come from? |
| Practice | Why did the last lesson feel different from the one before it? |
| Taken for granted | What do I always do without thinking, and why? |
| Self | What am I bringing into the classroom that is mine, not the subject’s? |
The starting point
Be aware of your assumptions, values, and beliefs, and how they shape practice. Without this, reflection skims the surface.
A teacher can reflect for an hour on whether the projector worked and learn nothing. The same teacher can reflect for ten minutes on the assumptions behind a single moment in class and change how they teach for years. The depth of reflection depends on what gets reflected on. Five layers are worth working through.
Reflecting on philosophy
Philosophy in this context means the deeper picture: how the teacher understands children, parents, families, communities, and their own role as a professional.
A teacher’s philosophy is rarely written down. It shows up in small moments. The teacher who consults a quiet student before assigning a role has a different philosophy from one who never does. Both teachers may have the same lesson plan. The philosophy decides what happens in the gaps.
Useful questions in this layer:
- How do I see children, parents, and families? As partners, as obstacles, as recipients of a service?
- To what extent are children’s views taken into account in my practice?
- What is my professional role in children’s and families’ lives, and how far does my influence reach?
- Do my practices reflect cultural competence, an honest understanding and respect for the cultures and communities of my students?
- How do I give children opportunities to express their own thoughts and feelings, and to develop a sense of agency?
- What are my own prejudices and biases?
These are uncomfortable questions. They are also the questions that produce critical reflection rather than dialogic reflection. The discomfort is the signal that the work is real.
Reflecting on values and beliefs
Values are the convictions that drive decisions: about children, families, and the teacher’s own role.
About yourself, the values may include “I am student-oriented”, “I see myself as providing a service”, “I have professional expertise to share”. About families, beliefs may run from “Families are the most important people in children’s lives” to (more concerning) “Families are the problem”. About children, the beliefs run from “Children are capable, interested learners from birth” to “Children are needy and vulnerable”.
Where do these beliefs come from?
- Life experiences, especially early ones inside the teacher’s own family and community.
- Professional study and experience, including teacher training and years in the profession.
- Shared values within a school or system, absorbed without being discussed.
A reflective teacher pulls these out into the open and looks at them. A teacher who has never asked “why do I believe what I believe about students?” is making decisions on autopilot.
Reflecting on practice
Practice is the easier layer because it is observable. Lesson plans, teaching methods, questioning patterns, group work, marking. A teacher reflecting on practice is asking which methods work for which students and why.
This is the most common layer of reflection. It is also the one most easily exhausted. A teacher who reflects only on visible practice ends up tinkering with technique while leaving the deeper layers unexamined. The technique gets sharper. The bigger questions stay closed.
The fix is not to skip this layer; the fix is to use it as the entry point to other layers. A practice question (“Why did the group work fall flat?”) often opens a values question (“What did I assume about how students would cooperate?”) which opens a philosophy question (“Whose voice was heard, and whose was missing?”). The chain leads from the visible to the foundational.
Reflecting on practices taken for granted
This is the hardest layer because the teacher cannot easily see what they take for granted. The routines have become invisible by definition.
A few ways to surface taken-for-granted practices:
- Watch a colleague teach a similar lesson. The differences highlight what each teacher assumes is normal.
- Be observed by a critical friend. Their notes often surface what is invisible to the teacher.
- Ask students. A short anonymous survey can name routines the teacher had stopped noticing.
- Try a different method deliberately. What feels strange is what was previously automatic.
The taken-for-granted layer is where critical reflection lives. Naming the routines is the first step. Asking why the routine is there is the second.
Reflecting on yourself
The fifth layer is the teacher’s own self. This includes professional identity (more on this in Professional Identity), but also more personal pieces: emotional reactions in class, what the teacher brings into the room from outside, how the teacher’s own school experience shapes their teaching.
This layer is uncomfortable for many teachers, especially in cultures where teaching is framed as a role to fulfil rather than a person to express. It is also the layer where burnout, frustration, and miscommunication tend to come from. A teacher who never reflects on themselves often misreads situations as student problems when they were teacher reactions.
The aim is not constant self-analysis. The aim is occasional, careful awareness of what the teacher is bringing in.
Philosophy, values and beliefs, practice, taken-for-granted, self
Philosophy is the deep picture: how the teacher sees children, families, and their own role. Values and beliefs are the convictions that drive decisions. Practice is what the teacher actually does. Taken-for-granted are the routines the teacher no longer notices. Self is the teacher’s own personal contribution to the room.
A reflective practitioner moves between layers, not staying only at the visible level.
Awareness as the starting point
Across all five layers, the same starting move applies. It is important to be aware of your own assumptions, values, and beliefs, and to see how they shape your practice.
Without that awareness, reflection skims the surface. The teacher catches the small things and misses the big ones. With awareness, even a short reflection can reach the layers that matter.
A useful exercise to start: take a recent lesson and ask, layer by layer, what was going on. What did I do (practice)? What did I take for granted? What did I believe? What was my philosophy showing? What of myself was in the room? Working through the five layers on a single lesson is a more useful drill than reflecting widely on a whole week.