Advantages and Drawbacks
Two-sided summary
Where it works
- Better fit between teaching and individual student needs
- Stronger working relationships with colleagues
- Faster, more effective lesson planning
- Better lines with parents and external agencies
- Real control over your own development
Where it gets criticised
- Lack of conceptual clarity. The term means different things to different writers (Van Manen 1995, Bleakley 1999).
- Too much focus on the individual. It can ignore the wider community of students, peers, and institutions (Sandwell 1996).
- Weak attention to language. It treats the practitioner’s own account as plain truth and skips how language shapes what is seen (Lather 1991, Taylor and White 2000).
- Failure to grasp the complexities of practice. Reflection in a textbook is tidy. Reflection in a real school sits inside time pressure, classroom politics, and emotional load.
The takeaway
Reflective practice helps when used with awareness of its limits. It hurts when treated as a magic process that automatically improves teaching.
Donald Schon coined the term reflective practice in his 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner. The idea spread fast across teaching, nursing, social work, and other professions. Spread fast also means scrutinised hard. Four critiques have stuck. Each one is worth taking seriously, because each one points to a way reflective practice can fail in real classrooms.
What teachers gain from reflective practice
Before the critiques, the gains are real. A reflective teacher who works at it for a year tends to develop in five areas.
Addressing students’ needs
Reading the room is a learnable skill. By thinking about how individual students responded to a method, a teacher can build a small library of “what works for this kind of learner.” Over a year, that library is more useful than any single training course.
Working with colleagues
Reflection is not only about the classroom. A teacher who reflects on how staff meetings go, how feedback lands with peers, and how cooperative planning sessions unfold tends to build better working relationships. The work itself becomes easier to enjoy.
Refining your role with students
A teacher who reflects on the effectiveness of how they work with students adjusts. The method that worked with the morning section may not work with the afternoon section. The reflective teacher notices the difference and changes approach.
Planning and recording
Lesson plans become faster and more accurate with reflection. The teacher learns which planning shortcuts hold and which ones produce empty lessons. Year on year, the planning gets sharper instead of staying static.
Working with parents and external agencies
In a Pakistani context this matters. Many teachers spend significant time with parents, social services, or community groups. Reflecting on these interactions tends to produce stronger lines of communication, which then makes the next interaction easier.
Critique 1: Lack of conceptual clarity
Different authors use the words “reflection” and “reflective practice” to mean different things. Van Manen (1995) noted that the idea of reflection is changing and may refer to a wide array of cognitive and philosophical approaches. Bleakley (1999) called it a catch-all term for an ill-defined process.
In practice this leads to confusion. One school uses “reflective practice” to mean weekly journal writing. Another uses it to mean structured peer observation. A third uses it as a slogan in policy documents that nobody applies. The phrase becomes elastic and starts to lose its bite.
The fix at the teacher’s level is to pick a model and name it. If you are using Gibbs’s cycle, say so. If you are doing critical incident analysis, say so. The named model gives the conversation something concrete to work with.
Critique 2: Too much focus on the individual
Sandwell (1996) argued that reflective practice often excludes the wider community: the students, the peers, the institution, and the parents. The reflecting teacher sits in a chair alone and processes their own thoughts, while the people who actually shaped the lesson are missing from the room.
Taylor and White (2000) made a similar point. Reflection in many published frameworks opens up an uncertain world and then closes it down again by privileging the practitioner’s own account. The student’s view is missing. The colleague’s view is missing.
The fix is to widen the lens. Reflection that includes student feedback, peer observation, and conversation with a critical friend is harder to bias. Reflection done alone in a journal can quietly confirm what the teacher already believed.
Critique 3: Weak attention to language and discourse
Lather (1991) drew attention to the fact that the language we use shapes what we are able to see. A teacher who writes “the students were lazy today” has framed the situation in a way that closes off other readings. The same lesson framed as “I lost their attention after the third example” opens a different door.
Schon’s original theory, the critics say, did not push hard on this. Practitioner accounts are treated as more or less true. Little effort is made to ask whether the words being used are doing extra work behind the scenes.
In practice, this means a reflective teacher should occasionally challenge their own labels. “Lazy”, “weak”, “uninterested”, “low-ability” are descriptions that hide more than they show. Reframing them in behavioural terms (“did not turn in the homework”, “looked away during the demonstration”) makes the next step easier to plan.
Critique 4: Failure to grasp the complexities of practice
Real classrooms are messy. Time is short. Emotions are loud. Other adults are watching. A reflection model on paper handles none of this. It assumes a calm room and a settled mind.
This is the gentlest critique because the fix is built into the field. Reflection done badly looks like a worksheet. Reflection done well treats the difficulty of the situation as part of the data, not as something to set aside.
There is also a danger in treating the people we reflect on as objects. Gardiner (1999) warned that without proper consideration of the human encounter, the practitioner is in danger of confronting others as a thing to be analysed and managed. A teacher reflecting on a student should keep the student’s full personhood in the picture, not reduce them to a case.
Vague concept, individualistic, weak on language, simplistic about practice
The term is used loosely (Van Manen, Bleakley). The model centres the lone practitioner and ignores community (Sandwell). It treats accounts as plain truth and skips how language shapes seeing (Lather, Taylor, White). And it can flatten the messy human reality of teaching into a neat worksheet.
What this means for a teacher who wants to use reflective practice
The critiques do not invalidate the method. They sharpen how to use it.
- Pick a named model, do not float on a vague slogan.
- Bring other voices in: student feedback, peer observation, a critical friend.
- Watch your own labels. The words you use are part of the data.
- Do not pretend the situation is tidier than it is. The mess is the work.
A reflective teacher who reads the critiques first usually does better reflection than one who treats the method as a finished product.