Reflective practice is a foundation of quality improvement within early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. By embracing reflective practice, services can navigate the complexities of governance and leadership, ensuring that every decision and action taken is both informed and purposeful.

What is reflective practice in ECEC?

Reflective practice provides a lens through which ECEC professionals gather information, analyse, plan, enact and evaluate to ensure continuous improvement. It requires you to critically assess your actions, experiences and events to drive quality uplift at your service.

Services may gather extensive data to both inform and evaluate their practices. Some examples of collated data are:

• key practices identified in self-assessment
• past assessment and rating reports
• goals in quality improvement plans
• educational leader documentation
• incidents or complaints.

Embedding reflective methodologies into service practice supports service leaders and educators to adhere to regulatory standards, be innovative and take a responsive, inclusive approach to ECEC.

Learning through and from experience

Engaging in reflective practice and fostering a culture open to review and adaptation enables services to identify and address challenges with agility and insight. Understanding the root causes of these challenges enables services to develop targeted strategies to enhance safety, compliance and quality within ECEC settings.

The educational leader, nominated supervisor and their team all have a role to play in addressing challenging areas effectively. This is illustrated in the following scenario.

Reflective practice example

Identifying regulatory improvements is also essential. Resources available on our website, including articles such as ‘Compliance Focus – Learnings to Enhance Your Practice in 2024’, highlight potential challenges.

Collaborative leadership and teamwork thrive on a shared sense of responsibility and professional accountability. This fosters a positive work culture, where innovation and critical reflection are encouraged.

Reflective practice and critical reflection – what’s the difference?

Reflective practice entails reviewing our actions and experiences to encourage growth and learning. In contrast, critical reflection goes deeper. It involves considering an individual's beliefs, attitudes and values and how they align with the service philosophy.

Margaret Wheatley, an American writer, identifies 3 main elements of critical reflection: self-awareness, building knowledge, and fostering relationships.

• Self-awareness is about deeply understanding our pedagogical impact on daily decisions involving children, as well as the influence of our professional knowledge, insights into children and families, and personal beliefs about children’s wellbeing.

• Building knowledge involves engaging with theory, research and practice from multiple perspectives to encourage innovative thinking and problem-solving.

• Fostering relationships aims to create an environment where trust, collegiality and respect for diverse viewpoints flourish. It encourages all educators to practice critical reflection, which promotes questioning established practices and acknowledges the value of different approaches.

Wheatley highlights the importance of being open to others' beliefs and interpretations to enrich our understanding. Reflective educators seek diverse opinions, are open to new ideas, rely on various sources of knowledge and are prepared to challenge the status quo. They remain conscious of their values and the wider social justice implications of their practice, ensuring ethical and well-informed decisions.

For instance, a service that is seeking to improve its enrolment processes for families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds may decide to provide forms in multiple languages. While this strategy supports the service’s overarching goal to streamline support for families, it may not fundamentally challenge existing pedagogical beliefs.

Integrating inclusivity throughout the educational program can be more complex and potentially require significant changes in practice after surveying families, researching theories and reflecting on celebrated events. As a result, critical reflection might lead to substantial, unforeseen adjustments.

Fostering a culture of reflective practice

Reflective practice can involve interactions with colleagues, children, families, other professionals and the community. Both reflective practice and critical reflection thrive when individuals and teams are receptive to change.

Encourage reflective practice by allocating time, engaging in pedagogical discussions, utilising journals, establishing critical friendships with other services and colleagues, and pursuing professional development.

Working together and driving continuous improvement requires a growth mindset. Teams may benefit from some 1:1 mentoring with a colleague or the educational leader.

Tips

• Collect information and evidence to guide decision-making.

• Foster a supportive culture.

• Observe, document and establish opportunities for reflection.

• Practise active listening.

• Be willing to adjust your approach.

• Reflect collaboratively and offer professional development and training.

• Refer to ‘Critical reflection and ongoing professional learning’ on page 18 of the updated Approved Learning Frameworks – ‘Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF)’ and ‘My Time, Our Place: Framework for School Age Care in Australia (MTOP)’. This section offers excellent questions you can use to prompt reflection in your service, for example: Who is advantaged/included when we work in this way? Who is disadvantaged, excluded, or silenced?