Learning from Reflection

The point of reflection is to learn from experience, not only to record it. A teacher who reflects without learning has done the activity without the result. Two questions sort the work: did the reflection help you make sense of what happened, and did it lead to a commitment to action?

Reflection as a means of learning

Reflection is most useful when treated as learning that has happened through experience. The teacher uses the reflection to make sense of what they have just been through, to explore their thoughts and feelings about it, and to connect it to what they will do next.

This framing matters because it sets the bar for what counts as good reflection. A description of a difficult lesson is not yet reflection. The reflection begins when the teacher asks what the lesson means and what to do about it.

Three things sit inside reflection that move it past description.

1. Active consideration of thoughts and actions. Not passive recall.
2. Learning from those thoughts and actions. Pulling out a lesson that can be reused.
3. Further use of what was learned. Applying it to a new situation.

The third element is what distinguishes reflective thinking from reflective journaling. The journal records. The thinking carries the learning forward into new lessons.

What reflective writing produces

Reflective writing has two effects, and both matter.

It adds to your knowledge

The first effect is the obvious one. By writing about a lesson, the teacher captures what worked, what did not, and what they noticed. This becomes a personal store of knowledge, useful for the next lesson and the lessons after.

It challenges the concepts you used

The second effect is less obvious and more useful. By writing carefully, the teacher is forced to articulate the concepts they were using to make sense of the situation. Once those concepts are on the page, they can be tested. Some hold up. Others quietly fall apart.

A teacher who never writes reflectively keeps using the same concepts forever. A teacher who writes carefully discovers, every few months, that one of their concepts has stopped working.

You see more, and you see differently

A useful summary: when you reflect on a situation, you do not only see more, you see differently.

Seeing more would be noticing details that were missed at the time. Useful, but limited. Seeing differently is restructuring the situation in your head: realising that what looked like a behaviour problem was actually an engagement problem, or that what looked like a comprehension issue was actually a confidence issue.

This different way of seeing produces statements about action. A teacher who has reflected well will say something specific about what they will do next. The commitment to action is the final stage of reflection. Without it, the reflection has stopped early.

A self-check on confidence

A reflective teacher benefits from honest self-assessment about their own knowledge and confidence across areas. The list below covers the main areas of teacher work. The exercise: rate yourself honestly on each, and identify two or three to focus on this term.

1. Roles and responsibilities of a teacher
2. Learning styles (used cautiously, see the caveat below)
3. Planning a course
4. Planning a lesson
5. How people learn
6. Lifelong learning
7. Communication skills
8. Presentation skills
9. Demonstration skills
10. Questioning and explaining
11. Using a range of teaching methods
12. Designing and using resources
13. Using ICT in teaching
14. Assessing learning
15. Reflection itself
16. Subject knowledge and skills

A short note on item 2: research since the early 2010s has been skeptical of fixed learning styles as labels for individual children. The cited research uses learning styles language, but a careful reading suggests using “varied lesson design” as the underlying skill, not “matching lessons to fixed learner types.”

The point of the self-check is not to become discouraged. It is to make decisions about where to put development effort.

Reflective practice as a holistic approach

Reflective practice assumes a holistic approach to learning. It starts with individual behaviour, but it pulls in everything connected to that behaviour: the individual’s background, the cultural context, and the relationships in which the behaviour sits.

This widens what counts as data for reflection. A teacher reflecting only on what happened in the four classroom walls is not seeing the full picture. A teacher reflecting on the same lesson AND on the students’ wider lives, the school’s culture, and their own background, has a richer base to work from.

The concept of cognition is also expanded inside this view. It moves from a narrow emphasis on information gathering and recall to the development of analytic and conceptual skills that let the teacher build the knowledge they need for the diverse demands of practice. A teacher is not learning facts; they are learning how to think about teaching well enough to handle situations they have not seen before.

Learning is collaboratively based

The holistic view also means that reflection is not solo. Collaboration extends beyond the relationship between learner and facilitator to include all the people in an interdependent learning process: students, colleagues, mentors, peers, families, and wider professional networks.

The practical implication: a teacher reflecting alone, week after week, year after year, will produce thinner reflection than a teacher whose practice is embedded in conversation with others. The conversation does not need to be a formal seminar. A weekly fifteen-minute coffee with a critical friend, a small reading group, an online community of practice, all count.

Flashcard

What is the final stage of reflection, beyond seeing more?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Commitment to action: a specific, concrete change in what you will do next

Reflection that stops at observation has stopped too early. The reflective work is complete only when the teacher has translated what they have seen into something they will actually do differently. This is what makes reflection different from reflective journaling.

What this means for the rest of the guide

The chapters that follow describe specific methods, models, and frameworks for reflection. Each one assumes the picture set up in this chapter: reflection as learning, with a commitment to action, holistic in scope, and collaborative in practice.

A teacher who reads the rest of the guide as a list of techniques will pick up tools but not the underlying purpose. A teacher who keeps the purpose in view as they encounter Kolb, Schon, Gibbs, Johns, and Boud will find that each model is a different angle on the same work: turning experience into learning, and learning into deliberate change.