Being a Reflective Practitioner

This chapter explores what reflective practice is and how students can use it support professional education and development as an early years practitioner. Early years practice focusses on the unique needs of individual young children, and as such presents practitioners with challenges on a daily basis, so that it can never become a matter of routine to follow set procedures and policies. Instead, as a practitioner students will need to consider the individual needs presented to them by different children, and how to address these using their professional education and past experience to guide you. Moss (2006) argued strongly that early years practitioners needed to be creative, independent, reflective thinkers rather than well-educated technicians applying routine practices to far from routine situations, and to achieve this student's need to understand and apply the processes of critical reflection.