2.1 What is reflective practice?

Reflective practice is a process that can be used to help practitioners to think about their work and actions in a structured way. Often when thinking back to an event we remember the ‘headlines’, the aspects that stand out, and these are usually the things that went really well or the things that went really badly. Using reflective practice techniques helps practitioners to explore an event in a more structured and in-depth way, and that helps to uncover the more subtle points and gain a better understanding of the whole event. Gibbs (1988) devised a set of questions that can be used to structure this reflective process:

1. Description: What happened?
2. Feelings: What were you thinking and feeling?
3. Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience?
4. Analysis: What sense can you make of the situation?
5. Conclusion: What could you have done differently?
6. Action plan: If the situation was repeated what would you do?

These questions can be applied to any situation to help us develop a clearer understanding of why we responded in the way we did, and identify areas we can change or develop in the future. In the same way that we need to use the observations we do to help us make progress, we need to act on the outcomes of our reflections and see them as part of a process. One of the best-known models used to support reflective practice is the ‘plan-do-review’ cycle (Johnston and Nahmad-Williams, 2009). In this approach we experience something, then later on we remember it and reflect on what happened. After reflecting we think about how we might change our response or actions to improve the experience, and then we implement this change to see if they make a difference.

As well as reflecting on specific activities or experiences, we can reflect on wider aspects of our practice. The Welsh Government Quality Framework for Early Childhood Play, Learning and Care in Wales (2023) sets out a whole series of reflective questions that encourage us to think about how we support children’s development, how we plan, how we create effective environments and lots of other areas of our work. Here is an example of the reflective questions that support consideration of how we plan the experiences we provide in our settings.

Using a combination of reflections on the experiences we provide alongside reflections on our practice as a whole will help to ensure that the babies and toddlers we work with are receiving the highest quality care and education.