Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional Development in Higher Education

Abstract

Reflective practice is becoming the favoured paradigm for continuing professional development in higher education. However, some authors have suggested that we have an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the process and too few descriptions of what actually occurs. Moreover, some commentators have identified a cognitivist strain in much reflective practice which has directed attention away from doing. This paper seeks to redress this balance by focusing on acting and reflecting though a case study of two professional development courses using the reflective practice model in HE. From the data we derive a typology which emphasises the temporal dimensions of reflective practice noting that while some acting may be immediate some reflection is deferred. We argue that a refocusing on action is important in response to the idealist turn of much thinking on reflective practice. We conclude that our reframing might have implications for the design of CPD for higher education lecturers.

Full text

Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional
Development in the UK Higher Education
Sue Clegg Sheffield Hallam University
Jon Tan Leeds Metropolitan University
Saeideh Saeidi Leeds Metropolitan University
Correspondence to:
Sue Clegg
Learning and Teaching Research Institute
Sheffield Hallam University
City Campus Howard Street
Sheffield S1 1WB UK
UK
s.clegg@shu.ac.uk
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Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional
Development in Higher Education
Abstract
Reflective practice is becoming the favoured paradigm for continuing professional development
in higher education. However, some authors have suggested that we have an insufficiently
rigorous understanding of the process and too few descriptions of what actually occurs.
Moreover, some commentators have identified a cognitivist strain in much reflective practice
which has directed attention away from doing. Our paper seeks to redress this balance by
focusing on acting and reflecting though a case study of two professional development courses
using the reflective practice model in HE. From our data we derive a typology which
emphasises the temporal dimensions of reflective practice noting that while some acting may be
immediate some reflection is deferred. We argue that a refocusing on action is important in
response to the idealist turn of much thinking on reflective practice. We conclude that our re-
framing might have implications for the design of CPD for higher education lecturers.
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Introduction
Much continuing professional development in UK higher education is influenced by the
reflective practioner paradigm. While considerable doubt has been cast about the clarity of
Schon’s concepts (eg Eraut, 1995, Bleakley, 1999, Clegg, 1999), its implementation in a variety
of contexts notably, nursing, social work, and initial teacher training, has led to reflective practice
taking on the veneer of educational orthodoxy (Ecclestone 1996, Clegg 2000). One of the more
beneficent reasons for reliance on reflection, despite question marks over the rigor of the concept,
is its acknowledgement the importance of artistry in teaching. Reflective practice provides a
philosophical bastion against the technicism in many recent policy debates (Coldron & Smith
1999a). This was of course Schon’s (1983, 1987) original intention. At a time when the quality
assurance regime in UK higher education appears intent on imposing ever tighter guidelines
reflective practice provides a model that upholds distinctive nature of professional knowledge
and know how. However, two related challenges are posed for research into CPD in HE based on
reflective practice. The first is to try understand more clearly what lecturers do and what
meanings they make when they are asked to reflect and the second based on these understandings
is to theorise reflective practice more clearly.
The purpose of this paper is therefore twofold. Firstly, to provide an account of how academics
engage with professional development by considering case study data from two accredited
development programmes delivered to staff of a post-1992 University in UK. Secondly, to
explore the possibility that our current understandings may rely on too narrow a model of the way
in which professional development takes place and that a more developed typology may be more
useful. The dominant model of reflective practice assumes that development is largely
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deliberative and linear, and that the relationship between reflection and action is transparent with
reflection-on-action leading to improvement and change (Tomlinson 1999a & b). Analysis of our
data led us to problematise the relationship between reflecting and acting. While our data
indicated that the preoccupations of many respondents was with acting much of the literature on
reflective practice has taken an idealist turn.
Reflective practice is increasingly theorised and evidenced though elaborated forms of writing.
(Denzin 1997, Bleakly 2000). Bleakly (2000) for example has argued for greater attention to the
form of writing and a greater self-awareness of literary accomplishments of narrating and the
confessional. This concern with literary form is part of the more general philosophical turn in the
past three decades towards post-modernism and a sensitivity to how discourse frames action.
However, our data suggested that some practitioners fail to write or only write as a form ex post
facto justification for accreditation purposes. To stretch Alan Bleakley’s metaphor of ‘invisible
ink’, the invisible ink in reflective practice serves not so much to obscure aesthetic self-awareness
of the forms of writing so much as to mask and divert attention away from actions which may not
be expressed through writing.
Peter Tomlinson (1999a & b) has criticised the cognitivist strain in reflective practice. He argues
that many classroom practitioners fail to confirm the view of practice posited by Schon. Despite
exposure to the idea of reflective practice some teachers hold onto their belief in the value of
practical immersion in the task to hand and deny that they reflect either in or on their actions.
Moreover, some of these non-reflecting, or reflection adverse teachers, appear to be perfectly
competent and skilled. One response to this seeming paradox could be to argue that teachers
misunderstand their own practice, but another is that our accounts of professional practice are
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partial or flawed. Tomlinson (1999a) argues that the Rylian ‘knowing how’ may be entirely tacit.
People may not be able to tell no matter how self-aware or poetic the language (Bleakley 2000).
Drawing on results from empirical psychology Tomlinson suggests that there is some evidence
that: ‘verbalisable knowledge may develop through high numbers of practice trails, emerging
only after implicitly processed task performance has improved’ (Tomlinson 1999a p 410). In
getting on and practising their craft teachers and other professionals may in fact be improving
their performance. Tomlinson (1999a) extends the range of subject positions from the dualism of
‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ to generate a fourfold classification, which as well as
including ‘deliberative action capacity’ and ‘explicit representational awareness’ in the explicit
register, gives us also ‘intuitive action capacity’ and ‘implicit representational awareness’ in the
unconscious or tacit register.
Guy Claxton (1998) has pointed out that human beings operate in different modes, the thinking
on the feet mode of keeping one’s wits about one, the deliberative mode, but also a slower more
ruminative mode. In a collection of papers edited under the title ‘the intuitive practioner’
Atkinson and Claxton (2000) challenge researchers to consider the value of ‘not always knowing
what one is doing’ (Claxton 2000) These insights act to extend the framework for considering
what might be happening as practitioners engage in CPD. Moreover, Miriam Zukas and Janice
Malcolm (1999) have argued that reflective practice is not the only model of the educator
available. They distinguish four other possible stances: the educator as critical practitioner, as
situated learner within a community of practice, as psycho-diagnostician and facilitator of
learning, or as an assurer of organisational quality and efficiency. Modern academics are likely to
find that they take on all these roles in their professional lives and moreover live out the tensions
and contractions between them. We therefore felt that it was likely that in exploring data
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collected from academics engaged in CPD involving ‘reflective practice’ that we would find
evidence of many practices not just one.
Our own data suggest that when academics are exhorted to become reflective practitioners as
measured by their capacity to produce a reflective practice assignment not all choose to do so.
Rather there are a range of responses, some simply fail to complete the task, others put off
keeping a journal or engaging in reflection but report nonetheless that they tried out new things in
action, others become enthusiastic reflective practitioners either through an internal monologue
or as journal keepers. Moreover, our data suggested that for many there were time lags between
action and reflection. Our case study therefore presents an analysis of our data which explores the
plurality of responses among of a group of academics who were asked to become engaged in
reflection.
The Case Study
The case study focuses upon a group of academic staff who enrolled on accredited courses at a
post-1992 English University between 1995-1998. The main source of data came from
qualitative, in-depth interviewing conducted with participants in two courses between 1998-99.
The first of these courses was a general course designed to support general teaching and learning
in higher education for both new staff and those with some experience who wished to improve
their skills and/or extend their theoretical understanding of their practice. The second course was
more specific, designed to support research supervisors. The supervisors’ course was aimed at
both novice and experienced supervisors who were active researchers and allowed them to be
formally recognised as qualified supervisors in the University’s research regulations. While staff
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enrolled before the establishment of the new national Institute for Learning and Teaching, debate
about the formation of such a body in the public domain was reported as a motivating factor for
some staff.
Both courses were accredited using the same regulatory framework and used a Reflective
Practice Assignment as the summative form of assessment based on formative reflective practice
period.
There were however differences in how this was implemented. The teaching and learning (T&L)
course used a portfolio approach, while the research supervision course depended on a more
discursive analysis of practice. Both courses organised formal workshops, delivered either at the
start, or spread over a number of sessions throughout the programme. There were variations also
in the participant make-up of the courses. The supervisors' course comprised largely of staff with
extensive HE experience even if they were new to supervision, while the teaching and learning
course included people new to both the profession and the institution. The study focused mainly
on gaining an understanding of how participants made sense of their experiences, how they
ascribed meaning to, and engaged with practice. Rather than being a simple evaluation of the
courses, the research explored how participants understood their activity including reflective
practice, their motivations for joining the course, how they made sense of their decisions to
complete or not complete, and whether they thought of this as a conscious decision. We have
chosen to use data from both courses because we wanted to explore how contextual factors might
frame participant’s accounts.
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Focussing upon meaning and understanding participant experiences led to the adoption of semi-
structured interviews as the most appropriate method of data collection. This method allowed
participants to talk about their experiences and identify issues that were important to themselves,
within the broad framework of themes that were of interest to the study. Participants were asked
to described the processes involved in deciding to enrol on the course; for their experiences of the
course; what aspects they considered useful/ valuable; and to describe what they did or did not do
after the workshops (when the presumption of the course was that they were engaged in activities
associated with reflective practice). Throughout the interview participants were asked about
factors that they considered to be facilitating or inhibiting. Finally, reasons and intentions for
completing or not completing the course through submission of the reflective practice assignment
were explored. Each interview also collected background information such as gender, completion
status, their categorisation subject area/Faculty, and their description of previous CPD. This latter
information they interpreted very widely to include research and external professional
development as well as higher education based CPD. All the interviews were tape-recorded and
transcribed – all participants being given the opportunity to see the transcription of their
interview. Assurances of anonymity and confidentiality were given, and all transcripts were
therefore stripped of any identifying characteristics in line with standard research practice.
A random stratified sampling method was adopted to enable the study to access a range of
experiences and the completion, continuing enrolment or non-completion status of respondents.
Similarly, the sample attempted to recruit equal numbers of males and females in order to inform
any variations in responses in relation to gender. The response rate was 78% with most of the
non-response being failure to establish contact rather than outright refusal. The actual sample is
described below.
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Table 1: Sample from Supervisor Course
Course Status Male Female Total
Complete 6 4 10
Continuing 5 5 10
Failed to complete 2 3 5
Total 13 12 25
The Course Status listed in the table is taken from official course records not the subjective perceptions of the participants. Some
of those registered as continuing made it clear in the interview that they in fact would not complete.
Table 2: Sample from Teaching and Learning Course
Course Status Male Female Total
Complete 4 3 7
Continuing 5 4 9
Failed to complete 3 3 6
Total 12 10 22
The Course Status listed in the table is taken from official course records not the subjective perceptions of the participants. Some
of those registered as continuing made it clear in the interview that they in fact would not complete.
The analysis involved the development of broad analytical categories based on depth reading of
the transcripts by two of the authors. It was only at this stage when the categories had been
inductively derived that detailed coding was developed and dedicated software (Nud-ist NVivo)
was employed as a mapping and analytical tool. A number of subject positions in relation to
reflecting and acting emerged out of descriptions of how and when reflection took place. While
these categories are not identical to the mapping suggested in the theoretical literature reviewed
above they do suggest that Tomlinson’s extension of the intersections within the procedural-
declarative is useful heuristic. Our typology attempts to capture the relationship between action,
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reflection and practice as it appeared in the interviews, rather than centring on the mapping of
individual ‘development careers’ as some respondents described engaging in different types of
activity over time
Types of Practice in CPD
Action Reflection
Immediate A
Immediate action following
workshops - often
characterised by
instrumentalist approach to
instruction
B
Reflection-on-action – most
usually by experienced
practitioners with relevant
proximate opportunities for
reflection
Deferred C
Lack of appropriate
practicum or experience –
blocks conceptualised as
situational by respondents
D
Reflection after action
frequently prompted by
assessment – but also
described after a period of
rumination (implicit
reflection)
Our positions A and B share some of the characteristics of ‘deliberative action’ and ‘explicit
representational awareness’ posited by Tomlinson, and D relates to aspects of Tomlinson’s
‘implicit representational awareness’ and Claxton’s descriptions of a more intuitive mode which
is only forced into consciousness or constituted as writing by the necessities of the assessment
regime (Clegg 1997). Our category of deferred action was derived from respondents’ descriptions
of situational factors which deterred them from further explicit describable engagement with their
own CPD. While this emerged as an important category in respondents self-understanding of
their own activity or their perception of lack of it, it is possible that this category masks ‘intuitive
action capacity’.
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Immediate Action
This response was described by many more of the relatively ‘novice’ group of lecturers
involved in the teaching and learning course. This course had more immediate impact on its
participants, none of the supervisors described themselves as going out and trying new activities
directly based in their experiences in the workshops. The supervisors’ responses appeared cooler
in contrast to some of the vivid descriptions of immediate changes in action by some of the
teaching and learning participants.
’Yes, I mean I’ve used the stuff with my own students in particular to approaches to
learning, I went to a very traditional top dog university and looking back on it we
weren’t taught very well. It did open up new ways of thinking about it…….. I think
it affected it in a positive way. I think I’ve increased my confidence as a result of
the course and I was able to make a lot of contributions to our... we had a course
review here for our undergraduate course and we were reviewing the course with a
view to making improvements and making assessment more, I don't know,
straightforward for the students. All sorts of things were going on and what I did all
the time was come back to my team and say ‘what can I do?’ you know ‘what can I
do to actually improve this area?’ So I was able to actually contribute to the course
review, contribute to a complete course redesign, as a result of that, because we all
had to redesign our courses anyway two years ago and a lot of that came from the
work I did on the teaching and learning diploma and otherwise I wouldn’t have done
it.’
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(T&L Female, Business Strategy)
In this participant’s response, the mediating factor for learning was through her own sense of
confidence in being able to do things, make changes and contribute to her course team. This
participant was very motivated to complete the course, yet she describes completing a journal and
preparing her assignment as a retrospective activity. In this sense her orientation to the course
was based in action and practice, with any reflective elements being deferred. Consequently, the
criticisms made in response were largely about the course being insufficiently practical in its
approach. Thus, this participant considered that the course would be improved and more
meaningful if it provided more scope for participants to make presentations - a practicum for
participants to try experiment with teaching and learning strategies. There is no doubt that for her
the course was highly successful in meeting her perceived CPD aims without the need for
protracted or explicit reflection. Another male participant who also described a retrospective
approach to completing his reflective assignment nonetheless reported dramatic changes in
practice:
‘It has drastically altered the way I teach very very seriously. The actual open and
distance learning bit, I do an element of open learning within the modules I teach
now and I’ve developed and learnt how to do that, but it’s more the teaching skills
per se and how I present things, how I package work, how I provide regular
feedback sessions, how I get students doing more than listening now. And it has
completely transformed virtually both of the key modules I teach across the whole
School.’
Interviewer: OK. Can you just give me one example of how your
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teaching has changed?
‘Well whereas one time we would have had a big lecture with the students and I
would have said this is this and explained it, now, very much from the beginning,
the work is structured, so they have blocks of study. The lectures don’t roll over as
such. They have work packs which they’ve got in front of them and even once the
structure of the work packs is explained, in the first few minutes they’re told right,
have a go at this task, then we’ll discuss in the group what you’ve got. Have a go at
this task, discussing it, going through that. The formative work is now a lot better
structured. In every sessions they get feedback on the formative work at the
beginning of the session, so that’s like a rolling programme.'
(T&L Male, Engineer)
This participant incorporates the language of the T&L course into his own descriptions – talking
about his use of ‘formative’ assessment in a way that suggests that he was comfortable within this
discursive framework of education. His account of coming onto the course suggests that this was
not based on prior exposure or involvement with learning and teaching issues. He describes his
enrolment onto the course as being ‘promoted’ by his head of school, with little sense of having
personally-driven particular aims. As he stated ‘I was almost sort of sucked into doing the
course’. This preoccupation with action and changing practice is also evidenced through
negative examples in the data where participants feel they have gained very little and where the
criticism of the T&L course was that it was insufficiently orientated towards action.
The supervisor course differed markedly in this respect. Criticisms of the workshops on the
supervisor’s course were argued more in terms of the course's intellectual level and the limited
degree to which it extended them beyond their own ‘common sense’. While the workshops might
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have failed to live up to expectations in other ways, such responses suggest they did not expect it
to provide prompts to dramatic or immediate changes in practice. Supervisors’ appeared to feel
that they had a rich repertoire of action already at their disposal, and thus while some described
changes upon reflection none were prompted to more immediate action. It is possible that such
differences may be attributed to the notion of ‘action’ that emerged from participants on the
Teaching and Learning course was in terms of a somewhat narrow sense of doing things
differently. Supervisors were, however, prompted to think about acting in a more holistic way as
a practice. The focus on action in the narrower sense therefore appears to be related to noviciate
perceptions of the need for immediate scope for new practice, which was temporally prior to, and
a necessary condition for retrospective reflection to take place. For many of these participants it
appeared as though a more directive instructional mode with clear indication of what might be
tried in practice was sufficient for their needs and may not require mediation though the
conscious activities associated with the idea of reflective practice. One respondent made the point
explicitly:
‘I think particularly what new staff are looking for is input more than reflection.
Maybe more experienced staff … So I think it would be helpful to provide these
are the different ways of doing assessments and doing examples and you know,
new ideas of ‘oh, instead of doing a lecture, you could run a session like this’,
interesting ways of teaching. And I think people would feel then that they’d got
something new out of it.’ (T&L Female, Built Environment)
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This insistence on the value of getting to grips with things that people could put into practice fits
with Tomlinson’s argument of the value of practice trials and the need for many to have taken
place before reflection on the nature of the learning can take place.
Immediate Reflection
‘Immediate’ reflection took place among participants who appeared to have the pre-disposition to
be able to start reflecting on their practice in the way most usually described in the reflective
practice literature. Participants in this group seemed to find immediate examples in their own
activity to act as a source for reflection. For some, the value of the reflection was the most
positive part of their CPD. As one supervisor reported:
‘I mean probably.. yeah, the most useful part really because you’re trying to make
sense of some of the issues that you’ve faced and not just think about them in your
mind but actually get them down on paper and try and make links from those sort
of perhaps personal experiences to issues that are talked about in the literature or
have been researched previously and so on.’
(Supervisor Course, Male, Human Resource Management)
His description, however, suggests that actually the process was difficult and he was diffident in
describing his journal as a proper ‘reflective practice journal’:
'Probably when the need arose I think, and whether it kind of meets the
15

rigorous description of a reflective practice journal, I don’t know, but I kept sort of
some notes on supervisory meetings and then from time to time, particularly
perhaps influenced by the course and the need for.. or conscious that the final
stages of the course were to utilise that kind of reflection rather more overtly, took
the opportunity to try and think ore deeply about some of the instances that I’d
kind of made rough notes on. So probably not a regular diary but more a
collection of odds and ends of notes, recollections, which then I did sort subject to
rather more scrutiny in either course sessions or currently in terms of the
assignment.
Interviewer: Did you enjoy doing your reflective journal or did you enjoy writing
your reflective journal?
‘ I don’t think enjoy is the right word. I find if I’m encouraged to do it and
almost pushed to do it, I find it useful. I find it hard for it to become automatic
everyday practice. So that it’s not feature of, in terms of not just this but other
activities as well, it’s not a feature of what I do, but I’m conscious that if I’m
pushed to do it then it does reveal useful insight.’
(Supervisor Course, Male, Human Resource Management)
This sense of difficulty was a common theme among a number of participants on both courses.
Virtually all the descriptions of keeping a journal or gather materials together suggested that they
somehow felt they had not done it properly – qualifying their descriptions in terms of things
being just scrappy notes, or jottings, or disorganised files, or annotated e-mail collections. Such
descriptions suggest that participants had an ideal-typical model of what reflective practice
should look like. While the overt message from both courses was that there was no one format, it
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appears that despite that, the tacit or underlying messages surrounding the idea of reflective
practice is that there a proper way of writing and that it constitutes a Foucauldian discipline with
its own rules.
Some of those who considered themselves to have actively engaged in reflection volunteered
self-reflexive accounts describing the conditions under which they felt people could engage in
reflective practice (Clegg 1999). One female supervisor, for example, while describing different
responses, developed an argument about the general ethos towards learning:
'You know I was mentioning this kind of cynicism, that you know there’s a certain
amount of cynicism around and to some extent I actually think that’s a sort of
misplaced machismo and that actually a course like this, one of the sort of ethos of
the course is it requires you to I don’t know, be a bit humble. It requires you to
take a step back and say perhaps I’m not doing things right or am I getting things
right, and throw some doubt on your mastery … And I sort of think that women
might find that more easy to do than men and that people who sort of describe that
as more macho cultured would perhaps resist operating in that sort of way. So I
actually think that it’s a positive move. It’s probably emblematic of the way
things are developing and that ought to develop, that we can perhaps move away
from sort of authoritarian expertise to people perhaps being able to be a bit more
reflective and you know not needing to sort of paint a position of mastery in
relation to everything they do, but to be able to step back and say perhaps I didn’t
do that really well or... So I think that can possibly be a bit threatening to people,
but you know, I hope that as time goes on that there’s more of a culture of that.'
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(Supervisor Course, Female, Education)
Symbolically it appeared as if reflection sat discursively alongside femininity (Clegg 1999,
2000), with other female respondents also using gender as an explanatory variable in the capacity
to reflect. Similarly, one male self-confessed enthusiastic reflector used the following dichotomy
describing his approach:
‘As a matter of fact, I’m an little bit more like … the “touchy-feely” reflective
practitioner, as opposed to “well this is the issues, this is what I’m going to do,
this is where I’m going”’ (T&L, Male, Architect)
As this response illustrates, the positioning of reflection alongside femininity is discursive, with
both men and women positioning themselves on the feminine reflective side as opposed to the
more active masculine doing side of practice. Furthermore, another male, in describing the value
of reflection, felt he had to break with his own subject location as an economist. Such responses
suggest that not only is reflection discursively contained with dominant gender metaphors but
that it is also discursively located alongside the softer social science disciplines.
Thus, in our typology, ‘immediate’ denotes more than a temporal relationship. Rather, it suggests
a set of self-described capacities that facilitate the rapid engagement with in reflective practice.
These capacities appeared to be differentially reported in relation to the two courses. There are
two possible explanations: Firstly, it may be argued that the supervisors course relied more
closely on a classic reflective practioner model, and this, in turn, was based on the designers
perceptions that these were a group who would have a relatively sophisticated approach to their
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own practice. A second explanation relates more directly to the nature of noviciate and
experienced status itself and the need for a prior engagement in practice as discussed in the
previous section. Both courses were, however, reliant on participants broader discursive
positioning the wider social context.
Deferred Action
In line with the concern with practice many of our participants deferred action was
conceptualised as a largely practical matter. Participants on the supervisors’ course in particular
experienced real difficulties in finding appropriate examples of practice upon which to reflect:
‘Well I think there is a big problem with the reflective practice period, in that you
simply do not see research students often enough to build up a sort of whole
series of issues or incidents that you can actually build on. I mean I have at the
moment two research students. One’s a part time Masters student, Masters by
research. Now I mean I only see him about four times a year. I’m also involved
with a full time student and I only see her, well at least as a group because there
are three supervisors, you know, possibly once every six weeks, something like
that, maybe even once every two months. Now there are simply not enough
incidents generated to really sort of stimulate my thinking. And unless one
actually sort of extended the reflective practice period over the entire period of a
research student’s activity. You would be in for three years, in the case of a part-
time research student it could be even longer. There simply isn’t enough
happening in the research process to really provoke the kind of thought which I
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think the course is intended to provoke. And in the assignment that I’m writing,
I’m really drawing as much on my experience before I did this course, to give the
assignment some substance. In fact there are more interesting incidents that I can
draw on in that period, before I did the course, than there are since I’ve started
the course.’ (Supervisor Course, Male, Information Systems)
The problem of not having students or not having sufficient data upon which to reflect was a
major problem for newer supervisors. Some, as in the above response, adopted the strategy of
referring back to previous experiences to overcome these limitations. Sharing data in action
learning groups was another strategy. However, situational barriers were considered to act as a
block to action - and thus reflection - by many respondents. In situations where individuals may
only engage with the activity in infrequent and isolated episodes, as with research supervision,
such limitations are likely to remain a problem.
Yet, for some participants on the teaching and learning course, the major problem encountered
was not frequency as such, but changing priorities mediated through time pressures:
‘I think mainly because of the length of time that I’ve been taking the diploma and
my role, my everyday role, my everyday work has changed slightly and moved very
much onto course management. The nature of what I’m doing for my assessment
has changed several times and now I’m very clear on what I’m doing, but in the past
what I was originally going to do is not actually very relevant any more. That’s just
because I’m obviously wanting to do a piece of work that is going to be useful for
20

my School and the focus has changed slightly through no fault of our own, you
know.' (T&L, Female, Hospitality Management)
The time factor involved in letting their CPD drift for a long time was very common. Many
participants experienced great difficulty in making time for their work a priority, as other more
immediate demands were felt as more pressing. Thus, while with few exceptions the teaching
and learning respondents had a rich variety of action contexts, focusing was sometimes difficult,
especially as more people in this group faced more pressures to do something useful for their
Faculty.
These conditions suggest a need to pay particular attention to the condition of practice as a pre-
requisite for reflection. There is little or no reported evidence of the creation of practicums for
higher education lectures as part of their CPD. This in contrast to the well developed and
common practice in areas of initial professional training for schoolteachers, social workers and
nurses. However our data suggests that for post-experience CPD the assumption of a secure
basis in-action on which to reflect may not be universally warranted. The ubiquity of the
problem for the supervisors suggests that if professionals are to improve their capacity to act in
new or relatively rare contexts some consideration might useful be given to exploring creating
the conditions for action and therefore of reflection rather than assuming their existence.
Deferred Reflection
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The idea of deferred reflection emerged from participants’ descriptions of deferring the formal
part of reflective practice. Rather than this time being 'empty' however, it created the
preconditions for a different kind of reflection. As one women on the teaching and learning
course recounted:
‘I just .. I just don’t make time to do it properly. I mean I’m kind of conscious of
doing it fairly regularly, But I’m not formalising it, and I think it would be very
helpful if I could take time out now, formal time out, and force myself to start
reflecting. I think it would have a much better impact on my work. I think there’s
possibly a problem with leaving it so long before I do it, but I think there are
bonuses to that as well, because you have a more holistic perspective, than kind of
doing it straight off which I could have done. I’m not pretending that I did it
consciously, it just happened but I still think it would be helpful having another slot
of time where you were actually forced to deliver.’
(T&L, Female, Leisure Studies)
Her sense that she has achieved a more holistic approach is suggestive that a more ruminative
period (Claxton 1997) has proceeded what she now sees as her need to be forced to deliver
something more formal. The time lag although not intentionally planned is re-framed as positive.
Later in the interview she refers again to the importance of delay and about how ‘afterwards it
starts to filter through into your brain’. Despite being very keen to finish for professional and
instrumental reasons to do with the anticipated formation of the Learning and Teaching Institute
she explains her failure to complete by reference to a different sort of time in which to really
reflect – ‘what’s missing from my professional life is time to really reflect thoroughly on what
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I’m doing’. The quality of this of time is very differently from the immediate pressures of her
busy everyday commitments.
Other male participants on the same course described a different relationship to reflection to that
involved by writing:
'And also, it has a very large emphasis on reflection, whereas I do a lot of reflection
on things, I don’t do reflection in a written form and one of the requirements of the
course is that you do a reflective journal. I’ve never been a diary person, so
probably for me personally, that’s been a very difficult thing to do, not because it’s
alien to my way of thinking, but it’s alien to the way I do things. I tend to think of
things and sort them out in my head, not on paper.'
(T&L, Male, Information Systems)
As this statement indicates, for some such ways of formally reflecting were somewhat ‘alien’ and
predetermined in a way that did not fit their own thinking, their sorting things out. As this male
participant identifies, working things through in his head was something distinct from any
formalised way of reflecting. Conversely, it was rather more an implicit process that might be
thought of as closer to Tomlinson’s ‘implicit representation awareness’. The processes of
development in these instances were thought of as part of a more practical and applied mode of
problem solving. Getting this to conform to the structured way of reflecting imposed by the
course caused some problem, as the following statement indicates:
‘Basically I kept written sort of little notes on the side of the notes, that was
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meant to be something to do to catch up on later and fill out. I mean I’ve got things,
but I’ve got them sort of all higgledy piggledy, which is the way my brain tends to
work, it slops about all over the place and I sort of change tack ‘ah, well that’s
related to that and that’s related’ and then magically about ten minutes later it all
comes back and it all makes sense.’
(T&L, Male, Information Systems)
The parallel drawn by this respondent was with the capacity to find practical mathematical
solutions without being able to write out the proof. Furthermore, translating this into reflection-
on-action was seen to involve moving to a different mode that might not necessarily improve his
practice. Thus, this different, ‘alien’ mode of reflection - as opposed to his own leaping to
solutions way of working – seemed less likely to effect practice development in a way that was
meaningful and comfortable.
The relation of writing to practice for this group of deferred reflectors appears problematic as it
does for the immediate action group. Some of participants in both groups chose not to complete,
one supervisor reported:
‘I have a feeling this is almost jumping through a hoop here. I’m not
going to actually gain anything very much from being assessed. By keeping
the notes and guides, I’ve got out of the course what I wanted to get out of it. To
come back to that would be if I’d kept a proper log anyway, in more detail, then I
wouldn’t have to do much writing up for it. But I tend to do things in more written
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shorthand, without really expanding to the lengths that would be required for
assessment.’ (Supervisor Course, Male, Law)
Again, the practical, applied approach of these participants is evident. As in the example above,
some made clear, positive decisions not to complete, considering that they had got what they
wanted from the course without the need to complete the assessment. Similarly, those that found
the formalised reflective practice writing to be somewhat at odds with their own approach, wrote
a sort of simulacra of reflection designed to meet the assessment criteria but without any
commitment to reflective practice as such. One male supervisor who had completed the course,
like others, described reflective practice as ‘alien’.
'Reflective practice, that whole sort a of idea is alien to me, so I didn’t really know
what I was kind of aiming for, that’s probably why it took such a hard slog for me to
get it together really….Actual time to produce quite... you know particularly if
somebody is not from that kind of tradition, not from a wordy kind of tradition, then
you know, it would take a lot of time. I mean I’ve put a lot of my own time
into this and that’s why I say I felt a bit resentful about actually doing it because it
was hard for me to do and it took a lot of time, that kind of wordy.... Er, to be honest
I don’t think so. I don't think so. I think I can obviously experience and all sorts of
things makes you confident, the more you do something, the better you get and the
more comfortable you feel with it. I can’t think of anything that I would be doing
now that I wouldn’t have done before. As I say, it wasn’t the reflecting on things
and thinking about my own past and how things have changed, it may have made
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some changes in me, but I can’t think you know, what they were. Obviously
thinking about research, but I can’t think that there’s anything I would do different.’
(Supervisor Course, Male)
Thus, for some the experience seemed to have been a negative one. Even for those that
completed the course and submitted the assignment, sometimes the form given to the reflective
practice was considered to be a writing style that was subscribed to for the simple reason that it
was required in order to ‘get on’. In these instances the emphasis was seemingly on an approach
to improvement through knowing how, rather than knowing why (Tomlinson 1999b).
Conclusions
This paper set out to provide an examination of the ways in which academics engage with
professional development. While our examples have illustrated the diversity of activities and
negotiations that are involved with such engagement, the richness of the data has necessitated a
very specific focus. Thus, our analysis at this stage has concentrated upon addressing a need to
widen our conceptualisation of professional development and the relationship between its active
and reflective components. Consequently, we have offered four typologies of this relationship
that may be considered useful in the construction of a better understanding of how individuals
approach their professional development, and how they manipulate the balance between
reflective and practical, applied activity in order to make the experience meaningful and of
value. Providing such a typology, we believe to be an important first step in opening out
discussions of professional development and the role of reflective practice.
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We have thus, at this stage, concentrated on how participants make sense of their engagement
with reflective practice, and have provided evidence that a diverse set of activities are being
carried out involving both action as well as reflection. However, we have not attempted to
normatively re-describe some of these as properly reflective and others as not as this would
foreclose the most interesting theoretical questions about whether our understanding of
reflective practice is too narrow.
We have shown that at least four positions can be represented, each based upon the different
orientations adopted by the individual with regard to the relationship between action and
reflection. Moreover, our findings overlap with the anti-cognitivist arguments of both Claxton
and Tomlinson. As reflective practice literature seems increasingly concerned with forms of
writing, action has become somewhat of a missing term. This is not to argue for a naivete of
interpretation of discursive practices. The deconstruction of the narrative mode with its simple
representational assumptions has much to recommend it and we have been sensitive in our
analysis to the placing of reflective practice within particular discursive frameworks. Nor would
we wish to imply a reductive understanding of practice, the immediate action focus among some
of our participants, as an effect on practice rather than practice itself does not foreclose a broader
analysis. If practice is the craft like experience embodying the affective, and cognitive, artistic
and scientific, personal and social experiences developed over many years, then we would not
expect it to be developed by a single involvement in CPD (Coldron & Smith 1999b). However,
we would hope that our analysis help refocus critical attention back toward theorising action and
practice.
27

There are political as well as theoretical reasons why we should engage critically with the issue
of practice. The new quality assurance agendas in higher education want evidence of
improvement. The danger is that practice will be understood in merely behavioural terms and as
in the school improvement literature practitioners will be exhorted to apply best practice
established on the basis of ‘evidence’ (Willmott 1999). Reflective practice as pioneered by
Schon suggested a more complex relationship between theory (or worse crudely conceived
‘evidence’) and practice. However the importance of practice as action and action as the basis
for reflection needs to be understood otherwise reflective practice will drift into a forms of
philosophical idealism and with it the twin problems of relativism and pragmatism (Norris 1996,
Bhaskar 1991). These are not a secure basis for a defence of professional action.
More prosaically the elaboration of the significance of acting is important in the design of CPD if
it is to meet the perceived needs of practitioners. Asserting the value of practice based trails as
having theoretical warrant can help us understand why participants might want and need to defer
reflection. Some of the voices in our study should be heeded, the idea of reflective practice as
‘alien’ may be part of the legacy of its fast becoming a mantra (Ecclestone 1996). As well as a
poor theoretical descriptor overly cognitivist and idealist versions of reflective practice may also
be bad press. We should also be cautious in our claims for what CDP based on reflective practice
can achieve. We may need other forms of intervention (Claxton 1997). Moreover we must take
care of how we operationalise ‘reflection’ in CDP and be aware of the possible conceptual
slippages between our own intentions as course designers, the mediated and complex processes
of learning, and learners own descriptions of outcomes. As Bleakly cautions we would be unwise
to opt wholesale for a model of CPD that is not rigorous:
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‘…the core notion of this model -“reflective” itself- has not been interrogated
with the kind of rigour that practitioners in higher education would normally
apply to their own disciplines’ theoretical framework.’ (Bleakley, 1999 p.315)
What is clear from our study is that the ways in which individuals engage with professional
development involve a complex negotiation of the relationship between reflective and active
components. If we are to better understand this relationship then we need to take full account of
the contexts within which such engagement takes place. At a structural level, issues that drive
policy development, such as notions of professional competence and the need to develop new
skills and technologies influence the relationship between reflection and action (Clegg, Konrad &
Tan 2000). Such factors exist as significant motivators in individuals’ approach to, and utilisation
of CPD. At the same time, the role of individual academics themselves in manipulating the
proximity of active and reflective components within this relationship is key to understanding the
ways in which they engage. If CPD in higher education is gain and sustain legitimacy, and is to
provide meaningful and useful experiences for its recipients, then further examination of the
range of possible relationships between acting and reflecting is necessary.
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