Being a 'Reflective Practitioner': How My Beliefs About Learning Have Influenced My Teaching (and Vice Versa)

Helping pre-service teachers develop into reflective practitioners is a difficult process. My attempts to encourage such development have taught me valuable lessons about learning and teaching; the most valuable lesson being that 'reflection' is of primary importance but it cannot occur without a base in 'practice'. Practice is difficult to provide within university classes, especially when a large number of students study externally. My current approach is to embed reflection in applied assessment tasks so that students must first use a strategy or theory in practice and then reflect on this practice. In this paper I describe my current beliefs about learning, how they have been influenced by my attempts to encourage my students to develop into reflective practitioners, and the role of assessment in this process.