Outdoor Learning and STEM  

Reflective Practice

Why do we do this ?

Throughout our working lives we should strive to be 'reflective practitioners'. This means we must be prepared to critically evaluate how we are doing, and how well we are performing. This is not about finding fault for the sake of finding fault ... it's about being able to critique our own working practices to determine what is going well, and what we need to continue to work on to improve. Review and reflection is an important part of activity planning. We should be reviewing the work we do, and reflecting on what parts went well, and what parts didn't, and we should be doing this so that we can modify plans for future activities.

How do we do this  ?

Being a reflective practitioner is simply a case of critically thinking about things that have taken place.  The purpose of reflecting on things is to  try to identify areas of weakness (within the activity) and areas of strength, so that you might  arrive at a plan for improving the activity the next time you deliver it or are involved with it.

It is essentially a critique of your working practice ... but this is NOT the same as a criticism of your working practice.

There are many 'models' used for reflective practice, but we are going to use a model proposed by British psychologist Graham Gibbs. This, like all the other models, is a step by step approach to thinking through events to help you identify how to improve things next time.

Click the image to learn about Gibbs Model in practice, and click the button below to download a copy of a form you can use.
Gibbs Reflective Cycle