The difficulty of defining reflection

My recent contribution to the ELT Journal Key Concepts feature (Anderson, 2020a) provided an opportunity to investigate the concept of reflection. Since the 1980s, reflection has become one of the most popular buzzwords in practitioner development, including teacher education, despite Dewey’s (1910/1933) much earlier discussion of its importance, which, while frequently cited retrospectively, received comparatively …

Can teachers learn from interactive reflection? A study into Schön’s reflection-in-action

Reflection-in-action is a highly influential, yet often misunderstood construct that is central to Donald Schön’s epistemology of practitioner learning (Schön, 1983, 1987). Particularly in the field of teaching it has often been understood to mean simply ‘thinking on one’s feet’ (e.g., Francis, 1995). Yet, within Schön’s epistemology, its importance was much more than this, as …