McLean – creating a climate for reflective practice

There’s three times in your practice that you’re reflective. You’re reflective before you do something, you’re reflective during the action, and you’re reflective afterwards. And I’m sure any early childhood educator can relate to that. Driving home, after work, going, I could have handled that a little bit better. That’s reflective. That’s what reflection looks like. 

But you need to be in an environment that supports that. You need to feel trust to do that in your environment. So when we’re talking about how administrators can support that, how directors can support that, they can create a climate where there is that trust. Where everybody can safely say, I could have done that better. You know, I wonder about how I handled that situation. Or there are times you can say, I was really good. That really went well. That went better than what I thought it was going to. And that it’s also a safe environment to share that with your colleagues.  

So in addition to trust there’s also the logistics of it, right? It’s providing time to be reflective. There has been research that shows that early childhood educators get very little time to actually reflect upon their practice. It happens during nap time, right? It happens during lunch, it happens during breaks. So if an administrator truly values the practice of being reflective then you’re going to build in the opportunities for that.  

And you’re also going to create a climate where you have a peer to reflect with, a critical friend or mentor or a colleague, because reflection is always better when it’s done with somebody else. When you can bounce off your ideas and your questions.  

So things like staff meetings. I’ve asked practitioners, what do you do during staff meetings? What do you talk about? We talk about parking policy. We talk about who left the fridge with the – their lunch in the fridge. Do you take time to reflect? No. And why is that?  

And so once I think people start thinking about how important it is they start building in that time to have some – to dedicate some part of the meeting to talking about what are our current practices, what can we do better? Tell me, share some stories with me about things that went really well. Share some stories with us about things that didn’t go really well. And then you’re creating that climate of critical thinking and inquiry.  

And that’s another point too that when we are looking at people who are in the field, did they grow up in a climate of inquiry and critical thinking? You know, a lot of us didn’t. A lot of us, when we went to work we did what we were told to do, right? And so now it’s – you know, it’s risky to say, well, question everything and think about it. But keep that in mind, that people don’t always have that ability to question or critique what they’re doing.  

So you can start off really slow. You can ask questions like, what do you do? Not why do you do it, but what do you do? And then once you tell me what you do, give me a little more detail about what you do and then tell me how you do it. And then let’s talk about why we do it.  

So you can – you can’t go from zero to 60 right away with reflective practice. You have to get into that whole mindset to just talk about what it is that you do. Because it’s not until you start identifying certain practices then you think, well, why do we do that? You know, why do we ask children to line up to go to the bathroom? Because it was always done? Or because it’s easier on me? Or, you know, why do we limit children’s behaviour in some way? Is it because it’s truly a safety risk or is it because I’m a little nervous about what is going to happen.  

So those are the opportunities that administrators can allow is that questioning of the status quo, of the things that we’ve always done and providing that time, that opportunity, the support, the pairing of colleagues to do that, and that takes leadership from the top. So you need to have a critical thinker, a reflective practitioner leading the process.