Using reflective practice as a tool for becoming a facilitator in reflective education practice
Author: Sahlee Cortez
Using Reflective Practice as a Tool for Becoming a Facilitator in Reflective Education Practice
Sahlee Cortez
28 June 2019
Executive Summary
My project is about the use of reflective practice as an instrument fostering deeper and more meaningful learning from past and current experiences within and outside the structured learning environment. This project of mine was a result of my reflection on how I came to be who was I as a practicing teacher in the Philippines as well as my reflections on who I can become as an educator here in New Zealand as well as a practicing professional in other fields I may be interested in the future.
The primary objective of the research was to validate my premise that reflection or reflective practice really helped individuals process and learn from the experiences they have had or are currently experiencing. Ultimately though, the goal of this research was gain experience doing formal and structured research. This research was carried out through the adaption of my reflection model in the exercises I gave student respondents. The research based on action research allowed me to implement the project over three progressive cycles of process and practice refinement. Student respondents from each research cycle undertook reflective exercises from a constructed website on reflective practice. All outputs and discussion were submitted digitally to protect anonymity of respondents. All responses in the exercises and discussions were aggregated in the interpretation of results.
The key evidence of the results was that the student respondents had learned from the reflective exercises. My key learning is evidenced in and by this report as well as the key evidence transformation I found in my own professional development.
I recommend that further study be done in the future where more participation can be achieved. In addition, to using my model of reflection, I would suggest to have more exercises patterned from other scholars like that of Donald Schön (Schon, 2017), Graham Gibbs (Qualters, 2010) and Jennifer Moon (Moon, 2013). Moreover, it would also be interesting to investigate whether the respondents can come up with their own model integrating the models presented to them with their own practice. Since my model deals with past experiences, it is recommended in further study to investigate whether the student can successfully identify what they want to learn and whether they can also can create suitable experiences to learn what they need.
Key words: Reflective Education Practice; Independent/self-directed learning; Professional Transformation; Guided and independent reflection; Experiential learning; Learning through reflection.
This research was supervised by James Harrison.
Licence
This thesis is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International.
