Reflective Practice: Looking Back

by Stephanie Clagnaz, Ed.D.

Reflective practice begins with considering past or present experiences and reflecting and learning from the outcomes. We use David Kolb’s Reflective Practice Cycle as we reflect on the school year thus far and analyze how student learning has gone, how our own professional growth has progressed, and how we’ve collaborated with our collegial teams. The graphic below gives us a visual representation of the reflective cycle, beginning with doing something, taking an in-depth look at how it went, considering whether or not things have changed, and determining what happens next.

In his book, Learning by Doing, Graham Gibbs suggests that we begin the reflective cycle by describing what happened in detail as if we were writing a story. Gibbs recommends that we begin with a brief outline highlighting what we did and how it went. As educators, we might think, “I came into this school year with a plan to increase student learning. What strategies did I plan to use? Did I use them? Revise them? How did it go? Did the strategies improve learning for all students? For a subset of students? What did my learning data show?” After completing the outline, add details to your reflection. What did I already know about student learning? How did I attempt to improve it?

Gibbs recommends that as we begin the reflective process by looking back, outlining our experiences, and adding details, that we refrain from analyzing our reality just yet. Focus first on using as many details as possible to describe what happened. In addition to using concrete data, consider your feelings about the experience. Describing your emotions and feelings about the experience will help you to understand your motivations and beliefs. And be critical about what took place! This is what makes reflection different from retelling. Consider not only what has gone well, but equally important are times that we failed. Failure is another opportunity to learn…what went wrong? What are possible reasons that my strategy failed? Include as many details about the experience that we can recall.

In one of LEDbetter’s ENL consortium schools, a teacher of multilingual students began the reflective practice process by asking himself, “What were the goals that I had coming into this school year?” He considered targets he set for his ENL students as well as professional goals that he prioritized for himself. Two main thoughts came to mind for him: for students, he wanted to emphasize reading for the “gist” of a text; for himself, he honed in on becoming more proficient in classroom management. Together, we began engaging in his reflective process, including the specific strategies he implemented in seeking to achieve these outcomes.

Together with his LEDbetter coach, our teacher began his reflective process for this school year. He discovered that with regard to his students’ reading process, some children make extraneous information in texts more important than critical aspects of the piece. One strategy that he began using was to encourage students to chunk the text, breaking it down into smaller pieces to decipher the central idea of each section and therefore gaining a clearer picture of the “gist” of the larger text. We also began discussing his confidence level with classroom management and how different it is for him when leading a small group of English learners in a math lesson versus being part of a small team trying to wrangle 200 students in the cafeteria. Again, at this point in the school year, we’re focusing on the goals he set entering this year and creating a story about what has happened thus far. In the coming weeks, we will delve further into the rest of the reflective cycle, leading us to a place where we can think about goals for next year.

Have you begun the reflective process for this school year? LEDbetter experts can help coach and guide you as you begin your reflection. Contact us today for an immediate appointment to help individual teachers, leaders, or school-wide teams to identify beginning-of-year goals and to create your story depicting how it has been going this year, specific strategies you used to achieve your goals, and to prepare for the remaining parts of the reflective practice cycle.

To learn more about how we can support you, please email excelerator@led-better.org, or schedule a call with us.

Additional Resources & Links:

EDUCATOR SPOTLIGHT | Reflective Practice + Experiential Learning

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