Critically reflective essay
Emma Purnell: 0522771

“Our planning (or worrying about) what’s happening next gives us little opportunity or inclination to examine what has just passed” Wallace (2005)

Writing from a student teacher perspective I thought it was very apt to start with the quote above. I believe I, like many student teacher colleagues, spend so much time worrying about what I have to do next, that sometimes I need to have a gentle prod or reminder that I need to be critically reflective of my actions in order to improve my future teaching performance. Sometimes if a session goes wrong I would rather not dwell on it and re-examine why it went wrong as it hurts my pride. However, this would be the easy option and how many times in future situations could I close my eyes and pretend bad experiences hadn’t happened? So regardless of how painful the experience it is vital that we critically reflect on everything we do as teachers, after all we reflect automatically on events in our personal life that we do or don’t want to happen again yet we find it harder to do it in our professional lives.

The idea of the need for reflection goes back to the time of Socrates who claimed that the unexamined life was not worth living. More recently however, the idea of reflection in learning was radical in the times of traditional educational institutions. John Dewey as early as the 1930’s wrote and advocated the need for reflection in learning. Dewey, the father of experiential learning was the first to put forward the idea that education was concerned with experience rather than abstract knowledge. Fawbert (2003) discusses Dewey’s work in contrasting routine action with reflective action. Routine day to day action was seen as relatively static and thus unresponsive to changing priorities and circumstances where as reflective action involves a willingness to engage