McLean – expanding reflective practice  

One of the areas that I’m particularly interested in and I’m doing research on right now is reflecting with children and encouraging children to be reflective practitioners of their own work and looking at co-constructing pedagogical documentation with a reflective lens.  

So in other words, not documenting, or talking with the child in the moment that something is happening, but then waiting three, four, five days and then sitting down using a photo as a catalyst and reflecting with the child on their thoughts on what was happening in that picture. And it’s been quite interesting to include that voice. And you know, when we – we can’t help but be reflective ourselves if we are put in situations where we need to be reflective with children, right? And to ask them questions that we don’t know the answer to. And just getting that whole art of questioning down. And once we start being able to question children in that way, then we can start questioning ourselves and our colleagues in that way as well too. 

When you’re being reflective you’re thinking about your own practice, but you’re also – and again this is something certainly before we had a name for it, that I would do, you know, after working with children, saying, well what was that experience like through the eyes of the child? You know what, in terms of maybe things that didn’t go well, even. That you’re saying, well what kind of experience did that child have? And what would they say about what was happening? 

So when you look at it through various lenses, and also through the lens of parents and family, then you become an even broader thinker of the impact that your actions have on children as well as families. And you get outside of yourself and you get away from that routine action, again too.  

And the other thing I think that reflective practice does is the gift that I want to give every early childhood educator and that is a fascination of children right? If we approached our positions, our jobs with that absolute fascination of what are they going to do? What will happen if I do this? And I was so surprised that that happened. Then that’s – that’s what a reflective practitioner is. Somebody who has that fascination.