The construction and reconstruction of the concept of the reflective practitioner in the discourses of teacher professional development

This paper looks at the concept of the reflective practitioner as it has been used in the design of teacher professional development programmes. I argue that this concept originated in ‘critical’, ‘liberatory’ discourses of education, but that it has been appropriated and used within ‘technicist’ approaches to education, and that this has occurred in the context of an ongoing search for new and more powerful ways of achieving the compliance of teachers in the process of implementing the results of educational research. I argue that the use of the concept of the reflective practitioner in teacher development programmes as a way of encouraging teachers in the clarification and evaluation of their ideas about, for example, teaching and learning, and then the subsequent reconstruction of these ideas in particular ways is both inappropriate and unlikely to produce the desired results.