Developing ways of thinking | Reflecting on theory and practice

I did have to think quite a lot about whether the way I was doing the work was a reasonable interpretation as a result of talking to other people about how they were doing it and about the people who arguably were recipients or participants or party to it. [In the past] I wouldn’t have thought in the same way. I would have trudged along, I think, and done the placement, done the task. I don’t think I would have understood it well enough.

When you are doing an area of study that is very much connected with your own work I think you are in a permanent state of reflection actually, I was anyway. You are continually checking through what you have done and thinking ‘is this the right way to do it?’

[The supervisors] are always at pains to stress to me that it is not personal, that it is just about pushing you forward.

Either I could reject the feedback [from my supervisors] or I could reflect on it and see the next step, the next perspective and by reflecting on it I found that has been very useful.

I don’t have a bit of a problem with criticism. I think it has been very good, certainly if anything has been written down I have been able to say ‘I don’t understand that’ or ‘explain that to me?’ I am aware that there are other viewpoints and … it is good to have other people looking at it from another direction and say ‘what about?’

I realise that we do need to reflect on absolutely everything. So you have a title, that is wonderful. You have your aims, you begin your literacy search, then you change the research questions which means, of course, that you have got to change the title. So you slightly change, or majorly change, the direction you are going in and then you continue the literature review, you start collecting your data … hang on, before you have actually collected the data, you are starting to plan how you are going to collect the data, you realise that there are a few little problems or major obstacles; this needs readdressing … OK I will change that slightly, which means I have got to change my research questions which means I have got to go back to the literature again, which means …

[I reflect] a lot. If I go back to Donald Schön [The Reflective Practitioner, 1983] it is much more reflection in action as opposed to on action … Sometimes it is reflection before action in the sense of 'If I take these and these steps, what would work? What would not work?' so I think it has really helped me out a lot.