Hi everyone, i'm new to this forum and i'm on the last assignment of Early Years Educator course and have been asked to discuss and summarise theoretical perspectives on reflection in relation to professional development, so my thoughts and findings are that, Reflection is used to describe the process of thinking about the work we do. Involves observing, questioning, evaluating and making improvements to own practice. Reflection is important to be able to monitor own practice and that of your colleagues, evaluate the effectiveness of your practice, identifying weaknesses and strengths and the areas in need of improvement. Not only this but reflection has many other areas it can help you with e.g. review and revise own practice and implement ideas, improve own perspective and professional behaviour, to observe and learn from children and to communicate with and learn from colleagues and others.
Kolbs, Gibbs, Schon and Johns are all theorists on reflection which are based on cyclical models, which encourage the process of ongoing reflection. There are two main theories that have been particularly influential in helping people to understand the reflective process,
1. Kolb's learning cycle, which can be used to help us reflect on our learning and therefore is used for reflective practice. Four processes need to be taken, according to Kolb, so that effective learning can take place.
Concrete experience-doing/having an experience,
Reflective observation-reviewing/reflecting on the experience,
Abstract conceptualisation-concluding/learning from the experience, developing new ideas,
Active experimentation-planning/trying out what you have learned, putting into action our new ideas.
The idea of the cycle is that when using it you can think about areas in your practice that need developing by reflecting on what you do and then putting the changes into action, then reviewing it again.
2. Gibb's reflective cycle which was taken from Kolb and adapted to create a more structured approach which would be used after situations have arisen to help adults reflect on their responses, but also to come to a conclusion.
The cycle of reflection:
Description- What’s happened?, Feelings - What were you thinking and feeling at the time?,
Evaluation - What was good/bad about the experience,
Analysis-What sense can you make of what happened?, Conclusion-what can you conclude from this?,
Action plan-What are you going to do now to change the way you work?
Gibbs cycle contains a conclusion stage, conclusions that might be reached is that more training is needed or that more opportunities to learn from others would be useful. This would then be fed into the action plan and therefore link to professional development. Gibb's cycle encourages a reflective practitioner to examine own practice and plan to what they can change to make future improvements.