Critical Reflection

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Critical Reflection Why bother ?
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Standard for Initial Teacher Education
(Student Teachers)

• Reflect on and act to improve the effectiveness
  of their own practice
• Know how to adopt a questioning approach to their
  professional practice
• Demonstrate a commitment to self-evaluation,
  lifelong learning and continuing professional
  development.

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Standard for Full Registration (All
Teachers)

• Reflect on and act to improve their own
  professional practice
• Ensure decisions about professional practice draw
  on sound evidence and what they have learned from
  their own experience of teaching
• Efficiently maintain a record of their own
  professional development activities and
  reflections

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Standard for Chartered Teacher (Expert
Teachers)

• Critical self-evaluation and development
• More sophisticated forms of critical scrutiny
• A heightened capacity for self- evaluation

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Standard for Headship (Head
Teachers)

• Provide a rationale for the way they operate,
  taking account of a variety of perspectives
• Regularly review their own practice
• Model their commitment to learning for life as
  the schools leading learner

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Becoming Critically Reflective Hunting
assumptions is crucial. Unexamined common
sense is a notoriously unreliable guide to
action. (Brookfield 1995)
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• Four possible lenses
• to illuminate our practice
• Our autobiographies as learners and
• teachers
• Our students eyes
• Our colleagues experiences
• Theoretical literature
• (Brookfield 1995)

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Critical Reflection
SOCIAL CONTEXT HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Theoretical Our autobiographies
literature as teachers and
learners
PRACTICE Colleagues Stakehold
ers experiences eyes POLITICAL
CONTEXT POLICY CONTEXT
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Our work does not take place in a vacuum and is
not a value- free activity. We have a
professional responsibility to be aware of the
external influences on our work and to have an
informed view about their impact. We need to be
able to subject our practice to scrutiny and
justify our approaches - to ourselves and
others.
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Critical reflection helps us develop a rationale
for our practice.
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Brookfield, S. D. (1995) Becoming a Critically
Reflective Teacher Jossey Bass San Fransisco