The reflection process will also help you to understand yourself and the way you teach. By asking yourself questions and self-assessing, you will understand what your strengths are and any areas where development might be needed. Reflecting allows you to understand how you have helped others to achieve and what this looks like in a practical learning environment. All these approaches are explained in the ‘Next steps’ section and provide a guide of how to carry out reflective practice, using the following. Reflection is a basic part of teaching and learning. It aims to make you more aware of your own professional knowledge and action by ‘challenging assumptions of everyday practice and critically evaluating practitioners’ own responses to practice situations’ (Finlay, 2008). The reflective process encourages you to work with others as you can share best practice and draw on others for support. Ultimately, reflection makes sure all students learn more effectively as learning can be tailored to them. Reflection-on-action should encourage ideas on what you need to change for the future. You carry out reflection-on-action outside the classroom, where you consider the situation again. This requires deeper thought, for example, as to why the students did not understand the topic. It encourages you to consider causes and options, which should be informed by a wider network of understanding from research. Reflection-in-action is reflection during the ‘doing’ stage (that is, reflecting on the incident while it can still benefit the learning). This is carried out during the lesson rather than reflecting on how you would do things differently in the future. This is an extremely efficient method of reflection as it allows you to react and change an event at the time it happens. For example, in the classroom you may be teaching a topic which you can see the students are not understanding. Your reflection-in-action allows you to understand why this has happened and how to respond to overcome this situation.

Birdsong by Madeleine Floyd | Waterstones Birdsong by Madeleine Floyd | Waterstones

The Benefits of PDCA ( Quality Progress) The brief history of PDCA and an example of PDCA in action help establish the use of this cycle for continuous process improvement.In Gibbs' model the first three sections are concerned with what happened. The final three sections relate to making sense of the experience and how you, as the teacher, can improve on the situation. The shared-planning process should encourage talking and co-operation. You should draw on support from colleagues to help develop practice and share ideas.

Simple Shapes Stunning Quilts by Stuart Hillard | Waterstones Simple Shapes Stunning Quilts by Stuart Hillard | Waterstones

There are many different models of reflective practice. However, they all share the same basic aim: to get the best results from the learning, for both the teacher and students. The final model builds on the other three and adds more stages. It is one of the more complex models of reflection but it may be that you find having multiple stages of the process to guide you reassuring. Gibb's cycle contains six stages:Being reflective helps you challenge your own practice as you will justify decisions and rationalise choices you have made. By reflecting, you will develop abilities to solve problems. Through questioning and changing the way you deliver your lessons, you will find new solutions and become more flexible with your teaching. It allows you to take time to assess and appreciate your own teaching. During this final stage, the practitioner sums up all previous elements of this cycle. They create a step-by-step plan for the new learning experience. The practitioner identifies what they will keep, what they will develop and what they will do differently. The action plan might also outline the next steps needed to overcome any barriers, for example enrolling on a course or observing another colleague. Part 3: The final webcast provides an example application of PDCA and explores the benefits of using PDCA. Another simple model was developed by Driscoll in the mid-1990s. Driscoll based his model of the 3 What's on the key questions asked by Terry Borton in the 1970s: