Reflective Practice
Reflective Practice
Reflective practice means asking questions about your own teaching to build a clear picture of what happened in the classroom.
Schön’s two types
- Reflection on action: thinking after the lesson is over
- Reflection in action: thinking during the lesson, while teaching
Sample questions
- Of 30 students, how many raised their hands?
- How many participated in discussion?
- How many used the resources correctly?
- How many wrote correct answers?
- What worked? What did not? Why?
A teacher who never thinks carefully about their own classroom keeps making the same mistakes. The fix is reflective practice: a habit of asking questions about what happened in the lesson and writing down honest answers.
The term comes from a useful analogy. In physics, light reflection is the bouncing back of light to create an image in a mirror. The teacher’s reflection works the same way. Teaching reflection is the answering of questions to create an image of the classroom.
Why reflection matters
A teacher rarely has someone telling them what their classroom looks like. A senior colleague might observe once a year. The head of department might walk past once in a term. Most days, the teacher is alone with their students. Without reflection, the teacher operates without a mirror.
A useful comparison: before going to a function, most people check their image in a mirror. Even after looking, they ask a sibling, parent, or child “how do I look?”. The mirror gave them an image. The question gives them a second opinion.
Teaching needs both. Reflection gives the teacher their own image of the lesson. Without it, every lesson runs blind.
Reflection on action
The first type of reflection is reflection on action. The lesson is over. The teacher is in the staff room or at home. They sit with their planning book and ask questions.
Sample questions:
- Of the 30 students in the class, how many raised their hands when I asked the main question?
- How many participated in the discussion?
- How many participated enthusiastically?
- How many used the resources correctly?
- How many wrote a correct answer?
The teacher writes down honest answers. The answers form an image: this is what actually happened. Where the image is good, the teacher keeps doing what worked. Where the image is poor, the teacher plans changes for tomorrow.
Reflection on action does not require special training or expensive tools. It needs honesty and time. Twenty minutes after class, with the planning book open, is enough.
Reflection in action
The second type of reflection is harder. It is reflection in action: thinking during the lesson, while teaching.
The teacher is mid-lesson. Half the class is confused. The teacher notices. They ask themselves, even briefly, why am I taking this action right now? What are my students thinking? Is the example I just gave landing? Is there a better example I could use right now?
The questions and answers happen in the same minute. The teacher adjusts on the spot. The example changes. The pace slows. The activity shifts.
Reflection in action is what separates a fluent teacher from a script-following one. A new teacher cannot do it. They are too busy executing the lesson plan to think about it. With experience, the script becomes automatic, and the teacher gains spare attention to spend on reflection during the lesson itself.
Donald Schön identified these two types. His framework of reflective practice is one of the foundations of professional teaching.
Timing
Reflection on action: thinking about the lesson after it is over.
Reflection in action: thinking about the lesson while teaching it. Adjustments happen in the same minute.
Both are part of Schön’s framework of reflective practice.
How to start reflecting
A teacher who has never reflected systematically can start small. Two practical habits:
- Keep a reflection journal. After every lesson, spend ten minutes writing answers to a fixed set of questions. The questions stay the same. Only the answers change.
- Set a single improvement target each week. Pick one thing to work on. End of the week, ask whether it improved. Use the journal entries to judge.
The skill builds slowly. The first reflections feel awkward and obvious. After a few weeks, patterns emerge. After a few months, the teacher starts to reflect in action without consciously trying.
Reflective practice is one of the standards a profession demands. A committed teacher who wants to raise professional standards lives by it.
Keep a reflection journal and set weekly improvement targets
After every lesson, spend ten minutes answering a fixed set of questions in a journal.
Pick one thing to improve each week. Use the journal to check progress at week’s end.
Why reflection matters beyond a single lesson: the teacher as an agent of change
Reflective practice keeps an individual lesson honest. It also serves a larger purpose. A teacher’s day-to-day work is local: this lesson, this class, these thirty children. The cumulative effect, over a career, is societal.
Society has problems that do not solve themselves. Poverty. Inequality. Environmental damage. Conflict. Lack of opportunity. Discrimination. These are solved by people who see them clearly, believe they can be changed, have the thinking and communication skills to imagine alternatives and organise others, and have the courage to act. People like that come from classrooms.
A teacher who only delivers content produces graduates who know facts. They may pass exams. They will not necessarily address society’s problems. A teacher who builds thinking, communication, and a sense of responsibility produces graduates who can act on what they see. Every Think-Pair-Share, every group project, every essential question, every discussion of ethical conflict shapes the kind of citizen the student becomes.
Reflective practice is what keeps that work alive over a long career. Without reflection, a teacher repeats the same lesson for thirty years. With reflection, the teacher keeps growing, and that growth is what students absorb.
’s closing wish for the course says it directly: teaching should never become stagnant in your career, because teaching is about growth, growth of the teacher as well as growth of the learner. Stay a learner. Plan every lesson even after twenty years. Treat children as diverse beings. Use a variety of methods, motivational strategies, and tools. Build divergent thinkers. Whatever method you choose, whatever theory you apply, whatever tool you reach for, the question that runs underneath is whether you and your students are still growing.
If yes, the day was a teaching day. If no, you taught nothing, no matter how many slides you covered. Reflective practice is how a teacher answers that question honestly.