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Reflective Practice:International andMultidisciplinary PerspectivesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/crep20

Reflecting or Acting? ReflectivePractice and ContinuingProfessional Development inHigher EducationSue Clegg , Jon Tan & Saeideh SaeidiPublished online: 18 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Sue Clegg , Jon Tan & Saeideh Saeidi (2002) Reflecting or Acting?Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional Development in Higher Education,Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 3:1, 131-146

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Re� ective Practice, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002

Re� ecting or Acting? Re� ective Practiceand Continuing Professional Developmentin Higher EducationSUE CLEGGLearning and Teaching Research Institute, Shef� eld Hallam University, City CompusHoward Street, Shef� eld, S1 1WB, UK; e-mail: s.clegg@shu.ac.uk

JON TAN & SAEIDEH SAEIDISchool of Education and Professional Development, Leeds Metropolitan University,Beckett Park Campus, Leeds LS6 3QS, UK

ABSTRACT Re� ective practice is becoming the favoured paradigm for continuing pro-fessional development in higher education. However, some authors have suggested that wehave an insuf� ciently rigorous understanding of the process and too few descriptions of whatactually occurs. Moreover, some commentators have identi� ed a cognitivist strain in muchre� ective practice which has directed attention away from doing. This paper seeks to redressthis balance by focusing on acting and re� ecting though a case study of two professionaldevelopment courses using the re� ective practice model in HE. From the data we derive atypology which emphasises the temporal dimensions of re� ective practice noting that whilesome acting may be immediate some re� ection is deferred. We argue that a refocusing onaction is important in response to the idealist turn of much thinking on re� ective practice.We conclude that our reframing might have implications for the design of CPD for highereducation lecturers.

Introduction

Much continuing professional development in UK higher education is in� uenced bythe re� ective practioner paradigm. While considerable doubt has been cast about theclarity of Schon’s concepts (eg Eraut, 1995; Bleakley, 1999; Clegg, 1999), itsimplementation in a variety of contexts notably, nursing, social work, and initialteacher training, has led to re� ective practice taking on the veneer of educationalorthodoxy (Ecclestone, 1996; Clegg, 2000). One of the more bene� cent reasons forreliance on re� ection, despite question marks over the rigor of the concept, is itsacknowledgement the importance of artistry in teaching. Re� ective practice provides

ISSN 1462-3943 print; 1470-1103 online/02/010131-16 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/14623940220129924

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132 S. Clegg et al.

a philosophical bastion against the technicism in many recent policy debates(Coldron & Smith, 1999a). This was, of course, Schon’s (1983, 1987) originalintention. At a time when the quality assurance regime in UK higher educationappears intent on imposing ever tighter guidelines re� ective practice provides amodel that upholds the distinctive nature of professional knowledge and know how.However, two related challenges are posed for research into CPD in HE based onre� ective practice. The � rst is to try understand more clearly what lecturers do andwhat meanings they make when they are asked to re� ect and the second, based onthese understandings, is to theorise re� ective practice more clearly.

The purpose of this paper is therefore twofold: � rstly, to provide an account ofhow academics engage with professional development by considering case study datafrom two accredited development programmes delivered to staff of a post-1992University in the UK; secondly, to explore the possibility that our current under-standings may rely on too narrow a model of the way in which professionaldevelopment takes place and that a more developed typology may be more useful.The dominant model of re� ective practice assumes that development is largelydeliberative and linear, and that the relationship between re� ection and action istransparent, with re� ection-on-action leading to improvement and change (Tomlin-son, 1999a,b). Analysis of our data led us to problematise the relationship betweenre� ecting and acting. While our data indicated that the preoccupations of manyrespondents were with acting much of the literature on re� ective practice has takenan idealist turn.

Re� ective practice is increasingly theorised and evidenced through elaboratedforms of writing. (Denzin, 1997; Bleakley, 2000). Bleakley, for example, has arguedfor greater attention to the form of writing and a greater self-awareness of literaryaccomplishments of narrating and the confessional. This concern with literary formis part of the more general philosophical turn in the past three decades towardspost-modernism and a sensitivity to how discourse frames action. However, our datasuggested that some practitioners fail to write or only write as a form ex post factojusti� cation for accreditation purposes. To stretch Alan Bleakley’s metaphor of‘invisible ink’, the invisible ink in re� ective practice serves not so much to obscureaesthetic self-awareness of the forms of writing so much as to mask and divertattention away from actions which may not be expressed through writing.

Peter Tomlinson (1999a,b) has criticised the cognitivist strain in re� ective prac-tice. He argues that many classroom practitioners fail to con� rm the view of practiceposited by Schon. Despite exposure to the idea of re� ective practice, some teachershold onto their belief in the value of practical immersion in the task to hand anddeny that they re� ect either in, or on, their actions. Moreover, some of thesenon-re� ecting, or re� ection adverse teachers, appear to be perfectly competent andskilled. One response to this seeming paradox could be to argue that teachersmisunderstand their own practice, but another is that our accounts of professionalpractice are partial or � awed. Tomlinson (1999a) argues that the Rylian ‘knowinghow’ may be entirely tacit. People may not be able to tell, no matter how self-awareor poetic the language (Bleakley, 2000). Drawing on results from empirical psy-chology, Tomlinson suggests that there is some evidence that: ‘verbalisable

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Professional Development in Higher Education 133

knowledge may develop through high numbers of practice trials, emerging only afterimplicitly processed task performance has improved’ (Tomlinson, 1999a, p. 410). Ingetting on and practising their craft, teachers and other professionals may in fact beimproving their performance. Tomlinson (1999a) extends the range of subjectpositions from the dualism of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ to generate afourfold classi� cation, which as well as including ‘deliberative action capacity’ and‘explicit representational awareness’ in the explicit register, gives us also ‘intuitiveaction capacity’ and ‘implicit representational awareness’ in the unconscious or tacitregister.

Guy Claxton (1998) has pointed out that human beings operate in differentmodes, the thinking on the feet mode of keeping one’s wits about one, thedeliberative mode, but also a slower more ruminative mode. In a collection of papersedited under the title ‘the intuitive practioner’ Atkinson and Claxton (2000) challengeresearchers 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 behappening as practitioners engage in CPD. Moreover, Zukas and Malcolm (1999)have argued that re� ective practice is not the only model of the educator available.They distinguish four other possible stances: the educator as critical practitioner, assituated learner within a community of practice, as psycho-diagnostician and facili-tator of learning, or as an assurer of organisational quality and ef� ciency. Modernacademics are likely to � nd that they take on all these roles in their professional lives,and moreover live out the tensions and contractions between them. We therefore feltthat it was likely that, in exploring data collected from academics engaged in CPDinvolving ‘re� ective practice’, we would � nd evidence of many practices, not justone.

Our own data suggest that, when academics are exhorted to become re� ectivepractitioners as measured by their capacity to produce a re� ective practice assign-ment, not all choose to do so. Rather there are a range of responses: some simply failto complete the task, others put off keeping a journal or engaging in re� ection butreport nonetheless that they tried out new things in action, others become enthusi-astic re� ective practitioners, either through an internal monologue or as journalkeepers. Moreover, our data suggested that for many there were time lags betweenaction and re� ection. Our case study, therefore, presents an analysis of our datawhich explores the plurality of responses among of a group of academics who wereasked to become engaged in re� ection.

The Case Study

The case study focuses upon a group of academic staff who enrolled on accreditedcourses at a post-1992 English university between 1995–1998. The main source ofdata came from qualitative, in-depth interviewing conducted with participants intwo courses between 1998–99. The � rst of these courses was a general coursedesigned to support general teaching and learning in higher education for both newstaff, and those with some experience who wished to improve their skills and/orextend their theoretical understanding of their practice. The second course was

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134 S. Clegg et al.

more speci� c, designed to support research supervisors. The supervisors’ course wasaimed at both novice and experienced supervisors who were active researchers, andallowed them to be formally recognised as quali� ed supervisors in the University’sresearch regulations. While staff enrolled before the establishment of the newnational Institute for Learning and Teaching, debate about the formation of such abody was in the public domain and was reported as a motivating factor for somestaff.

Both courses were accredited using the same regulatory framework and used aRe� ective Practice Assignment as the summative form of assessment based onformative re� ective practice period. There were, however, differences in how thiswas implemented. The teaching and learning (T&L) course used a portfolio ap-proach, while the research supervision course depended on a more discursiveanalysis of practice. Both courses organised formal workshops, delivered either at thestart, or spread over a number of sessions throughout the programme. There werevariations in the participant make-up of the courses. The supervisors’ course wascomprised largely of staff with extensive HE experience even if they were new tosupervision, while the teaching and learning course included people new to both theprofession and the institution. The study focused mainly on gaining an understand-ing of how participants made sense of their experiences, how they ascribed meaningto, and engaged with practice. We have chosen to use data from both coursesbecause we wanted to explore how contextual factors might frame participantsaccounts.

Focussing upon meaning and understanding participant experiences led to theadoption of semi-structured interviews as the most appropriate method of datacollection. This method allowed participants to talk about their experiences andidentify issues that were important to themselves, within the broad framework ofthemes that were of interest to the study. Participants were asked to described theprocesses involved in deciding to enrol on the course; for their experiences of thecourse; what aspects they considered useful/valuable; and to describe what they didor did not do after the workshops (when the presumption of the course was that theywere engaged in activities associated with re� ective practice). Throughout theinterview participants were asked about factors that they considered to be facilitatingor inhibiting. Finally, reasons and intentions for completing or not completing thecourse through submission of the re� ective practice assignment were explored. Eachinterview also collected background information such as gender, completion status,their categorisation subject area/Faculty, and their description of previous CPD. Allthe interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed—all participants being given theopportunity to see the transcription of their interview. Assurances of anonymity andcon� dentiality were given, and all transcripts were therefore stripped of any identify-ing characteristics in line with standard research practice.

A random strati� ed sampling method was adopted to enable the study to accessa range of experiences and the completion, continuing enrolment or non-completionstatus of respondents. Similarly, the sample attempted to recruit equal numbers ofmales and females in order to inform any variations in responses in relation togender. The response rate was 78% with most of the non-response being failure to

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Professional Development in Higher Education 135

TABLE I. Sample from Supervisor Course

Course Status Male Female Total

Complete 6 4 10Continuing 5 5 10Failed to complete 2 3 5Total 13 12 25

The Course Status listed in the table is taken from of� cialcourse records not the subjective perceptions of the partici-pants. Some of those registered as continuing made it clear inthe interview that they in fact would not complete.

establish contact rather than outright refusal. The actual sample is described inTables I and II.

The analysis involved the development of broad analytical categories based onin-depth reading of the transcripts by two of the authors. It was only at this stagewhen the categories had been inductively derived that detailed coding was developedand dedicated software (Nud-ist NVivo) was employed as a mapping and analyticaltool. A number of subject positions in relation to re� ecting and acting emerged outof descriptions of how and when re� ection took place. While these categories are notidentical to the mapping suggested in the theoretical literature reviewed above, theydo suggest that Tomlinson’s extension of the intersections within the procedural-declarative is a useful heuristic. Our typology attempts to capture the relationshipbetween action, re� ection and practice as it appeared in the interviews, rather thancentring on the mapping of individual ‘development careers’, as some respondentsdescribed engaging in different types of activity over time.

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 ofTomlinson’s ‘implicit representational awareness’ and Claxton’s descriptions of a moreintuitive mode which is only forced into consciousness or constituted as writing bythe necessities of the assessment regime (Clegg, 1997). Our category of deferredaction was derived from respondents’ descriptions of situational factors whichdeterred them from further explicit describable engagement with their own CPD.

TABLE II. Sample from Teaching and Learning Course

Course Status Male Female Total

Complete 4 3 7Continuing 5 4 9Failed to complete 3 3 6Total 12 10 22

The Course Status listed in the table is taken from of� cialcourse records not the subjective perceptions of the partici-pants. Some of those registered as continuing made it clear inthe interview that they in fact would not complete.

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TABLE III. Types of Practice in Continuing Professional Development

Action Re� ection

A BImmediate Immediate action following Re� ection-on-action—most usually by

workshops—often characterised by experienced practitioners with relevantinstrumentalist approach to instruction proximate opportunities for re� ection

C DDeferred Lack of appropriate practicum or Re� ection after action frequently prompted

experience—blocks conceptualised by assessment—but also described afteras situational by respondents a period of rumination (implicit re� ection)

While this emerged as an important category in respondents self-understanding oftheir own activity or their perception of lack of it, it is possible that this categorymasks ‘intuitive action capacity’.

Immediate Action

This response was described by many more of the relatively ‘novice’ group oflecturers involved in the teaching and learning course. This course had moreimmediate impact on its participants, none of the supervisors described themselvesas going out and trying new activities directly based in their experiences in theworkshops.

‘It did open up new ways of thinking about it … I think it affected it in apositive way. I think I’ve increased my con� dence as a result of the courseand I was able to make a lot of contributions to our … we had a coursereview here for our undergraduate course and we were reviewing the coursewith a view to making improvements and making assessment more, I don’tknow, straightforward for the students. All sorts of things were going onand what I did all the time was come back to my team and say ‘what canI do?’ you know ‘what can I do to actually improve this area?’ So I was ableto actually contribute to the course review, contribute to a complete courseredesign, as a result of that, because we all had to redesign our coursesanyway two years ago and a lot of that came from the work I did on theteaching and learning diploma and otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.’(T&L Female, Business Strategy)

In this participant’s response, the mediating factor for learning was through her ownsense of con� dence in being able to do things, make changes and contribute to hercourse team. This participant was very motivated to complete the course, yet shedescribes completing a journal and preparing her assignment as a retrospectiveactivity. Her orientation to the course was based in action and practice, with anyre� ective elements being deferred. Consequently, the criticisms made in response toquestioning were largely about the course being insuf� ciently practical in its ap-

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Professional Development in Higher Education 137

proach. This participant considered that the course would be improved and moremeaningful if it provided more scope for participants to make presentations—apracticum for participants to experiment with teaching and learning strategies.There is no doubt that, for her, the course was highly successful in meeting herperceived CPD aims without the need for protracted or explicit re� ection. Anothermale participant, who also described a retrospective approach to completing hisre� ective assignment, nonetheless reported dramatic changes in practice:

‘It has drastically altered the way I teach very very seriously. The actualopen and distance learning bit, I do an element of open learning within themodules I teach now and I’ve developed and learnt how to do that, but it’smore the teaching skills per se and how I present things, how I packagework, how I provide regular feedback sessions, how I get students doingmore than listening now. And it has completely transformed virtually bothof the key modules I teach across the whole School … whereas one time wewould have had a big lecture with the students and I would have said thisis this and explained it, now, very much from the beginning, the work isstructured, so they have blocks of study. The lectures don’t roll over assuch. They have work packs which they’ve got in front of them and evenonce the structure of the work packs is explained, in the � rst few minutesthey’re told right, have a go at this task, then we’ll discuss in the groupwhat 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 session they getfeedback on the formative work at the beginning of the session, so that’slike a rolling programme.’ (T&L Male, Engineer)

This participant incorporates the language of the T&L course into his own descrip-tion—talking about his use of ‘formative’ assessment in a way that suggests that hewas comfortable within this discursive framework of education. His account ofcoming onto the course suggests that this was not based on prior exposure orinvolvement with learning and teaching issues. He describes his enrolment onto thecourse as being ‘promoted’ by his head of school, with little sense of havingpersonally-driven particular aims. As he stated ‘I was almost sort of sucked into doingthe course’. This preoccupation with action and changing practice is also evidencedthrough negative examples in the data where participants feel they have gained verylittle, and where the criticism of the T&L course was that it was insuf� cientlyorientated towards action.

The supervisors’ course differed markedly in this respect. Criticisms of theworkshops on the supervisor’s course were argued more in terms of the course’sintellectual level and the limited degree to which it extended them beyond their own‘common sense’. While the workshops might have failed to live up to expectationsin other ways, such responses suggest that they did not expect it to provide promptsto dramatic or immediate changes in practice. Supervisors appeared to feel that theyhad a rich repertoire of actions already at their disposal, and thus while somedescribed changes upon re� ection, none was prompted to more immediate action.It is possible that such differences may be attributed to the notion of ‘action’ that

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emerged from participants on the Teaching and Learning course which was in termsof 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 onaction in the narrower sense, therefore, appears to be related to noviciate percep-tions of the need for immediate scope for new practice, which was temporally priorto, and a necessary condition for retrospective re� ection to take place. For many ofthese participants it appeared as though a more directive instructional mode, withclear indication of what might be tried in practice was suf� cient for their needs, andmay not require mediation though the conscious activities associated with the ideaof re� ective practice. One respondent made the point explicitly:

‘I think particularly what new staff are looking for is input more thanre� ection. Maybe more experienced staff … So I think it would be helpfulto provide these are the different ways of doing assessments and doingexamples and you know, new ideas of ‘oh, instead of doing a lecture, youcould run a session like this’, interesting ways of teaching. And I thinkpeople would feel then that they’d got something new out of it.’ (T&LFemale, Built Environment)

This insistence on the value of getting to grips with things that people could put intopractice � ts with Tomlinson’s (1999a) argument of the value of practice trials, andthe need for many to have taken place before re� ection on the nature of the learningcan take place.

Immediate Re� ection

‘Immediate’ re� ection took place among participants who appeared to have thepre-disposition to be able to start re� ecting on their practice in the way most usuallydescribed in the re� ective practice literature. Participants in this group seemed to� nd immediate examples in their own activity to act as a source for re� ection. Forsome, the value of the re� ection was the most positive part of their CPD. As onesupervisor reported:

‘I mean probably … yeah, the most useful part really because you’re tryingto make sense of some of the issues that you’ve faced and not just thinkabout them in your mind but actually get them down on paper and try andmake links from those sort of perhaps personal experiences to issues thatare talked about in the literature or have been researched previously and soon.’ (Supervisor Course, Male, Human Resource Management)

His description, however, suggests that actually the process was dif� cult and he wasdif� dent in describing his journal as a proper ‘re� ective practice journal’:

‘Probably when the need arose I think, and whether it kind of meets therigorous description of a re� ective practice journal, I don’t know, but I keptsort of some notes on supervisory meetings and then from time to time,particularly perhaps in� uenced by the course and the need for … orconscious that the � nal stages of the course were to utilise that kind of

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Professional Development in Higher Education 139

re� ection rather more overtly, took the opportunity to try and think oredeeply 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 ofnotes, recollections, which then I did sort subject to rather more scrutinyin either course sessions or currently in terms of the assignment.

Interviewer: Did you enjoy doing your re� ective journal or did you enjoywriting your re� ective journal?

‘I don’t think enjoy is the right word. I � nd if I’m encouraged to do it andalmost pushed to do it, I � nd it useful. I � nd it hard for it to becomeautomatic everyday practice. So that it’s not feature of, in terms of not justthis but other activities as well, it’s not a feature of what I do, but I’mconscious that if I’m pushed to do it then it does reveal useful insight.’(Supervisor Course, Male, Human Resource Management)

This sense of dif� culty was a common theme among a number of participants onboth courses. Virtually all the descriptions of keeping a journal or gathering materi-als together suggested that they somehow felt they had not done it properly—qual-ifying their descriptions in terms of things being just scrappy notes, or jottings, ordisorganised � les, or annotated e-mail collections. Such descriptions suggest thatparticipants had an ideal-typical model of what re� ective practice should look like.While the overt message from both courses was that there was no one format, itappears that the tacit, or underlying messages surrounding the idea of re� ectivepractice are that there is a proper way of writing and that it constitutes a Fou-cauldian discipline with its own rules.

Some of those who considered themselves to have actively engaged in re� ectionvolunteered self-re� exive accounts describing the conditions under which they feltpeople could engage in re� ective practice (Clegg, 1999). One female supervisor, forexample, while describing different responses, developed an argument about thegeneral ethos towards learning:

‘You know I was mentioning this kind of cynicism, that you know there’sa certain amount of cynicism around and to some extent I actually thinkthat’s a sort of misplaced machismo and that actually a course like this, oneof the sort of ethos of the course is it requires you to I don’t know, be a bithumble. It requires you to take a step back and say perhaps I’m not doingthings right or am I getting things right, and throw some doubt on yourmastery … And I sort of think that women might � nd that more easy to dothan men and that people who sort of describe that as more macho culturewould perhaps resist operating in that sort of way. So I actually think thatit’s a positive move. It’s probably emblematic of the way things aredeveloping and that ought to develop, that we can perhaps move away fromsort of authoritarian expertise to people perhaps being able to be a bit morere� ective and you know not needing to sort of paint a position of masteryin relation to everything they do, but to be able to step back and sayperhaps I didn’t do that really well or … So I think that can possibly be abit threatening to people, but you know, I hope that as time goes on thatthere’s more of a culture of that.’ (Supervisor Course, Female, Education)

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140 S. Clegg et al.

Symbolically it appeared as if re� ection sat discursively alongside femininity (Clegg,1999, 2000), with other female respondents also using gender as an explanatoryvariable in the capacity to re� ect. Similarly, one male self-confessed enthusiasticre� ector used the following dichotomy describing his approach:

‘As a matter of fact, I’m an little bit more like … the “touchy-feely”re� ective practitioner, as opposed to “well this is the issue, this is what I’mgoing to do, this is where I’m going” ’ (T&L, Male, Architect)

As this response illustrates, the positioning of re� ection alongside femininity isdiscursive, with both men and women positioning themselves on the femininere� ective side, as opposed to the more active masculine doing side of practice.Furthermore, another male, in describing the value of re� ection, felt he had to breakwith his own subject location as an economist. Such responses suggest that, not onlyis re� ection discursively contained with dominant gender metaphors, but that it isalso 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 engage-ment within re� ective practice. These capacities appeared to be differentially re-ported in relation to the two courses. There are two possible explanations: � rstly, itmay be argued that the supervisors’ course relied more closely on a classic re� ectivepractitioner model, and this, in turn, was based on the designers’ perceptions thatthese were a group who would have a relatively sophisticated approach to their ownpractice. A second explanation relates more directly to the nature of noviciate andexperienced status itself, and the need for a prior engagement in practice asdiscussed in the previous section. Both courses were, however, reliant on partici-pants’ broader discursive positioning the wider social context.

Deferred Action

In line with the concern with practice many of our participants’ deferred action wasconceptualised as a largely practical matter. Participants on the supervisors’ coursein particular experienced real dif� culties in � nding appropriate examples of practiceupon which to re� ect:

‘Well I think there is a big problem with the re� ective practice period, inthat you simply do not see research students often enough to build up asort of whole series of issues or incidents that you can actually build on. Imean I have at the moment two research students…. Now there are simplynot enough incidents generated to really sort of stimulate my thinking. Andunless one actually sort of extended the re� ective practice period over theentire period of a research student’s activity … There simply isn’t enoughhappening in the research process to really provoke the kind of thoughtwhich I think the course is intended to provoke.’ (Supervisor Course,Male, Information Systems)

The problem of not having students or not having suf� cient data upon which tore� ect was a major problem for newer supervisors. Some, as in the above response,

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adopted the strategy of referring back to previous experiences to overcome theselimitations. Sharing data in action learning groups was another strategy. However,situational barriers were considered to act as a block to action—and thusre� ection—by many respondents. In situations where individuals may only engagewith 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 problemencountered was not frequency as such, but changing priorities mediated throughtime pressures:

‘I think mainly because of the length of time that I’ve been taking thediploma and my role, my everyday role, my everyday work has changedslightly and moved very much onto course management. The nature ofwhat I’m doing for my assessment has changed several times and now I’mvery clear on what I’m doing, but in the past what I was originally going todo is not actually very relevant any more. That’s just because I’m obviouslywanting to do a piece of work that is going to be useful for my School andthe 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 dif� culty in making time for their work apriority, as other more immediate demands were felt as more pressing. Thus, whilewith few exceptions the teaching and learning respondents had a rich variety ofaction contexts, focusing was sometimes dif� cult, especially as more people in thisgroup faced more pressures to do something useful for their Faculty.

These conditions suggest a need to pay particular attention to the condition ofpractice as a pre-requisite for re� ection. There is little or no reported evidence of thecreation of practicums for higher education lecturers as part of their CPD. This incontrast to the well developed and common practice in areas of initial professionaltraining for schoolteachers, social workers and nurses. However, our data suggestthat for post-experience CPD, the assumption of a secure basis in-action on whichto re� ect may not be universally warranted. The ubiquity of the problem for thesupervisors suggests that, if professionals are to improve their capacity to act in newor relatively rare contexts, some consideration might usefully be given to exploringcreating the conditions for action, and therefore of re� ection, rather than assumingtheir existence.

Deferred Re� ection

The idea of deferred re� ection emerged from participants’ descriptions of deferringthe formal part of re� ective practice. Rather than this time being ‘empty’ however,it created the preconditions for a different kind of re� ection. As one woman on theteaching and learning course recounted:

‘I just … I just don’t make time to do it properly. I mean I’m kind ofconscious of doing it fairly regularly, But I’m not formalising it, and I think

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it would be very helpful if I could take time out now, formal time out,and force myself to start re� ecting. I think it would have a much betterimpact on my work. I think there’s possibly a problem with leaving it solong before I do it, but I think there are bonuses to that as well, becauseyou have a more holistic perspective, than kind of doing it straight offwhich I could have done. I’m not pretending that I did it consciously, itjust happened but I still think it would be helpful having another slot oftime where you were actually forced to deliver.’ (T&L, Female, LeisureStudies)

Her sense that she has achieved a more holistic approach is suggestive that a moreruminative period (Claxton, 1998) has proceeded what she now sees as her need tobe forced to deliver something more formal. The time lag, although not intentionallyplanned, is re-framed as positive. Later in the interview she refers again to theimportance of delay, and about how ‘afterwards it starts to � lter through into yourbrain’. Despite being very keen to � nish, for professional and instrumental reasonsto do with the anticipated formation of the Learning and Teaching Institute, sheexplains her failure to complete by reference to a different sort of time in which toreally re� ect—‘what’s missing from my professional life is time to really re� ect thoroughlyon what I’m doing’. The quality of this time is very different from the immediatepressures of her busy everyday commitments.

Other male participants on the same course described a different relationship tore� ection from that involved by writing:

‘And also, it has a very large emphasis on re� ection, whereas I do a lot ofre� ection on things, I don’t do re� ection in a written form and one of therequirements of the course is that you do a re� ective journal. I’ve neverbeen a diary person, so probably for me personally, that’s been a verydif� cult thing to do, not because it’s alien to my way of thinking, but it’salien to the way I do things. I tend to think of things and sort them out inmy head, not on paper.’ (T&L, Male, Information Systems)

As this statement indicates, for some, such ways of formally re� ecting were some-what ‘alien’ and predetermined in a way that did not � t their own thinking, theirsorting things out. As this male participant identi� es, working things through in hishead was something distinct from any formalised way of re� ecting. Conversely, itwas rather an implicit process that might be thought of as closer to Tomlinson’s‘implicit representation awareness’. The processes of development in these instanceswere thought of as part of a more practical and applied mode of problem solving.Getting this to conform to the structured way of re� ecting imposed by the coursecaused some problem, as the following statement indicates:

‘Basically I kept written sort of little notes on the side of the notes, that wasmeant to be something to do to catch up on later and � ll out. I mean I’vegot things, but I’ve got them sort of all higgledy piggledy, which is the waymy brain tends to work, it slops about all over the place and I sort of

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Professional Development in Higher Education 143

change tack “ah, well that’s related to that and that’s related” and thenmagically 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 � nd practicalmathematical solutions without being able to write out the proof. Furthermore,translating this into re� ection-on-action was seen to involve moving to a differentmode that might not necessarily improve his practice. Thus, this different, ‘alien’mode of re� ection—as opposed to his own leaping to solutions way of working—seemed less likely to effect practice development in a way that was meaningful andcomfortable.

The relationship of writing to practice for this group of deferred re� ectors appearsproblematic, as it does for the immediate action group. Some of the participants inboth groups chose not to complete, one supervisor reported:

‘I have a feeling this is almost jumping through a hoop here. I’m not goingto actually gain anything very much from being assessed. By keeping thenotes 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 moredetail, then I wouldn’t have to do much writing up for it. But I tend to dothings in more written shorthand, without really expanding to the lengthsthat would be required for assessment.’ (Supervisor Course, Male, Law)

Again, the practical, applied approach of these participants is evident. As in theexample above, some made clear, positive decisions not to complete, consideringthat they had got what they wanted from the course without the need to completethe assessment. Similarly, those that found the formalised re� ective practice writingto be somewhat at odds with their own approach, wrote a sort of simulacra ofre� ection designed to meet the assessment criteria but without any commitment tore� ective practice as such. Thus, for some, the experience seemed to have been anegative one. Even for those who completed the course and submitted the assign-ment, sometimes the form given to the re� ective practice was considered to be awriting style that was subscribed to for the simple reason that it was required inorder to ‘get on’. In these instances, the emphasis was seemingly on an approach toimprovement through knowing how, rather than knowing why (Tomlinson, 1999 a,b).

Conclusions

This paper set out to provide an examination of the ways in which academics engagewith professional development. While our examples have illustrated the diversity ofactivities and negotiations that are involved with such engagement, the richness ofthe data has necessitated a very speci� c focus. Thus, our analysis at this stage hasconcentrated upon addressing a need to widen our conceptualisation of professionaldevelopment, and the relationship between its active and re� ective components.Consequently, we have offered four typologies of this relationship that may beconsidered useful in the construction of a better understanding of how individuals

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approach their professional development, and how they manipulate the balancebetween re� ective and practical, applied activity in order to make the experiencemeaningful and of value. Providing such a typology, we believe to be an important� rst step in opening out discussions of professional development and the role ofre� ective practice.

We have thus, at this stage, concentrated on how participants make sense of theirengagement with re� ective practice, and have provided evidence that a diverse set ofactivities are being carried out involving both action as well as re� ection. However,we have not attempted to normatively re-describe some of these as properlyre� ective, and others as not, as this would foreclose the most interesting theoreticalquestions about whether our understanding of re� ective practice is too narrow.

We have shown that at least four positions can be represented, each based uponthe different orientations adopted by the individual with regard to the relation-ship between action and re� ection. Moreover, our � ndings overlap with theanti-cognitivist arguments of both Claxton (1998, 2000) and Tomlinson (1999a,b).As re� ective 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 ofinterpretation of discursive practices. The deconstruction of the narrative mode,with its simple representational assumptions has much to recommend it and we havebeen sensitive in our analysis to the placing of re� ective practice within particulardiscursive frameworks. Nor would we wish to imply a reductive understanding ofpractice. The immediate action focus among some of our participants appeared asan effect on practice rather than practice itself. If practice is the craft-like experienceembodying the affective, and cognitive, artistic and scienti� c, personal and socialexperiences developed over many years, then we would not expect it to be developedby a single involvement in CPD (Coldron & Smith, 1999b). However, we wouldhope that our analysis helps refocus critical attention back toward theorising actionand practice.

There are political as well as theoretical reasons why we should engage criticallywith the issue of practice. The new quality assurance agendas in higher educationwant evidence of improvement. The danger is that practice will be understood inmerely behavioural terms, and as in the school improvement literature, practitionerswill be exhorted to apply best practice established on the basis of ‘evidence’(Willmott, 1999). Re� ective practice, as pioneered by Schon suggested a morecomplex relationship between theory (or worse crudely conceived ‘evidence’) andpractice. However, the importance of practice as action, and action as the basis forre� ection, needs to be understood, otherwise re� ective practice will drift into a formof 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 ofprofessional action.

More prosaically the elaboration of the signi� cance of acting is important in thedesign of CPD if it is to meet the perceived needs of practitioners. Asserting thevalue of practice based trails as having theoretical warrant can help us understandwhy participants might want and need to defer re� ection. Some of the voices in ourstudy should be heeded, the idea of re� ective practice as ‘alien’ may be part of the

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Professional Development in Higher Education 145

legacy of its fast becoming a mantra (Ecclestone, 1996). As well as a poor theoreticaldescriptor, overly cognitivist and idealist versions of re� ective practice may also beoff-putting. We should also be cautious in our claims for what CDP based onre� ective practice can achieve. We may need other forms of intervention (Claxton,1997). Moreover, we must take care of how we operationalise ‘re� ection’ in CDPand be aware of the possible conceptual slippages between our own intentions ascourse designers, the mediated and complex processes of learning, and learners owndescriptions of outcomes. As Bleakley cautions we would be unwise to opt wholesalefor a model of CPD that is not rigorous:

‘… the core notion of this model—“re� ective” itself—has not been interro-gated with the kind of rigour that practitioners in higher education wouldnormally 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 withprofessional development involve a complex negotiation of the relationship betweenre� ective and active components. If we are to better understand this relationship,then we need to take full account of the contexts within which such engagementtakes place. At a structural level, issues that drive policy development, such asnotions of professional competence, and the need to develop new skills and tech-nologies, in� uence the relationship between re� ection and action (Clegg et al.,2000). Such factors exist as signi� cant motivators in individuals ’ approach to, andutilisation of CPD. At the same time, the role of individual academics themselves inmanipulating the proximity of active and re� ective components within this relation-ship is key to understanding the ways in which they engage. If CPD in highereducation is to gain and sustain legitimacy, and is to provide meaningful and usefulexperiences for its recipients, then further examination of the range of possiblerelationships between acting and re� ecting is necessary.

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