Mentoring Activities

Mentor Information

Self-Reflective Practices (Cont.)

Levels of Reflection

In order to make reflection a tool for improvement, it is important to recognize three developmental levels of reflection. These levels can be categorized as: technical, contextual, and critical.

At the Technical Level, reflection focuses on what you are doing. It may address the quality of practice independent of its effects, though often what prompts reflection about practice is the effect, or lack of effects on students. (For example, 'I thought that those adaptations I made for ___ in the math materials for today's lesson were exactly what he needed…I wonder why they didn't work very well?')

Reflection at the Contextual Level concentrates on the relationship between some situation and the actions of the teacher and others. That is, cause and effect relationships that include the teacher and students, but also include the broader classroom, program, school or community context. (For example, 'My response to ___ behavior was effective yesterday. I know that today's behavior had the same underlying cause, but ___ didn't respond well today. I wonder what else was going on that made the difference?')

At the Critical Level reflection goes deeper and broader - outside the individual - and may focus on such things as commitment to social justice.

These levels are developmental, and not everyone will progress through the levels to reach critical reflection.

What to Reflect On

A lot happens every day that could be reflected on, but you need to pick and choose the important things to reflect on.

Often beginning special educators might reflect on lessons or events that pretty much went according to plan. While this might be good for the ego (which is not a bad thing!) it probably will not lead to development or improvement as an educator.

On the other hand, such reflection can add to the experience and knowledge that supports what beginning special educators already thought or believed. This focus of reflection should not be discouraged, but it isn't enough.

There are a number of different lists available that provide guidance or structure for a beginning special educator's reflection. All, however, are in the form of questions.

Reflection, then, should be around 'Critical Incidents' that occur during a day, week or some longer period of time. Or it might be around events that surprised the beginning special educator. These are things that did not go according to plan, or the outcome was a total surprise.

These are the types of events that provide good fodder for collaborative reflection between beginning special educators and mentors. Mentors, with a much broader set of experiences and well developed internal cause-effect relationships (grounded theories) to draw upon can be a great benefit to the beginning special educator as they try and make sense of these anomalies.