Oral and Written Reflection in Practice Management: An Action Research Approach

Reflection in Practice Management (PM) favoured the integrated approach where learners had to critically reflect on the study material, assessments and tasks throughout the year and to integrate their experiences in a meaningful manner that would demonstrate their development and learning over the year. Reflection in the form of portfolios focused on personal development and individual learning rather than on achieving a general set of course outcomes. But assessment of these portfolios revealed no real evidence of reflection or critical thinking. This study suggested that learners be assessed orally so that their reflections could come alive and so that the educator could learn from the assessment to restructure or re-curriculate where necessary. This study found that although the orals were not a preferred form of assessment, they contributed successfully to informing the written critical and reflective thinking in the portfolios. Using an action research approach, enabled us to not only address a fundamental problem that the educators and learners were battling with—how to encourage and indeed teach learners to think critically and to reflect, but it also showed the educators how to solve problems or seek solutions to didactic problems in their own classrooms. The recommendations in this paper may therefore inform courses other than PM that use reflective practice, critical thinking or portfolio assessments.