Mrs
Hi everyone, I am also on my last unit of my Early Years Educator course and have found this forum and thread very informative.
Joining in with this discussion on the importance of reflection in relation to professional development. I feel that reflection and reflective practice involves observing, questioning, evaluating and then using that information to make improvements to your own practice and perhaps your colleagues in your setting as well. Reflective practice is important as it allows us to monitor our own practice, evaluate how effective we are, look into what our strengths and weaknesses are ensure that we are continually learning and improving our practice. During my studies I have found my sessions sheets and reflective practice I write after each activity allow me to develop as I look at where I can improve, how the activity went, how did the children enjoy it? It gives you an opportunity to look at improvement and by doing this continually it ensures continually enriching the children and their families.
The theories of reflection I found were:
Kolb's experimental learning cycle - in summary Kolb believed in a cycle of on-going reflection represented by a four stage learning cycle starting with Concrete Experience where you immerse yourself in the experience and look at what happened, next is Reflective Observation where you look at what you noticed about the experience an what it made you think about, the third part of the cycle is Abstract Conceptualization which is where you look at how you might change things and lastly is Active Experimentation where you may try out new ideas. Kolb believed effective learning is seen when a person progresses through all of these cycles, resulting in new experiences.
The other theory is Gibbs Cycle of Reflection which was developed from Kolb's Experimental learning cycle. Gibbs model relates to learning through repetition, the reflective process follows the 6 steps of the model so that each step informs the next. The aims of using Gibb's reflective cycle are to:
Challenge your assumptions, explore new ideas or different ways of doing things, promote self-improvement by identifying your own strengths and weaknesses and to link theory and practice to combine doing with thinking.
Thanks for everyone's previous thoughts and opinions, feel free to share you views on my post.
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