ABSTRACT
This chapter first briefly revisits why reflective practice is important for educators in such demanding times. It then reviews the relationship between reflection and the relevant standards documents related to teacher professional practice before exploring how a number of education stakeholders in Phase 1 of our study conceptualised being reflective both personally and in their workplace practice. In general, the educators interviewed distinguished between professional and personal reflection. Professional reflection was regarded as more formal and often integrated into structured development processes. Personal reflection was defined as informal and unstructured, with little reference to theory or frameworks. The need to provide a safe environment and adequate time for workplace reflection was highlighted. While the importance of peer reflection was recognised, time pressures due to over-crowded teaching and administrative demands were cited as obstacles. School principals placed more emphasis on the value of embedding reflection into existing formal frameworks, such as performance development to provide structure and guidance. Tertiary mentors felt that professional experience could sometimes be overly supervised leading to the early career teacher feeling a loss of agency and disinclination to reflect on practice. Reflection is thus in danger of becoming solely a means to critique performance in the classroom or to explore a particular curriculum problem – what works, what doesn’t work, what improvements could be made – rather than to think more deeply about broader systemic constructs.
