Critical Reflection
Critical reflection in teaching is the deliberate examination of the assumptions — about learners, knowledge, power, and one's own competence — that shape a teacher's practice. It is distinguished from descriptive reflection (recounting what happened) and from evaluative reflection (judging what worked) by its insistence on surfacing and questioning the underlying beliefs that make some pedagogical choices feel obvious and others invisible.
Brookfield's four lenses
Stephen Brookfield's Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, published by Jossey-Bass in 1995 and revised in a second edition in 2017, has been the most influential single framework for critical reflection in teacher education. Brookfield argues that teachers cannot examine their own assumptions from a single vantage point — they need multiple perspectives that triangulate one another. He proposes four lenses through which a teacher should look at their practice.
The autobiographical lens draws on the teacher's own experience as a learner and as a teacher: classroom journals, recollections of being taught, reflections on critical incidents. It surfaces the assumptions teachers hold without realising they hold them.
The students' eyes lens uses what students actually say about the class — anonymous mid-course feedback, the Critical Incident Questionnaire that Brookfield himself developed, learner journals — to test whether the teacher's account of the lesson matches the learners' account.
The colleagues' perspectives lens brings in the views of fellow teachers — through peer observation, team meetings, mentoring conversations, professional reading groups — as a check against the teacher's blind spots.
The theoretical literature lens uses scholarship to name and critique the broader assumptions in which the teacher's practice is embedded, making available concepts and traditions the teacher would not generate alone.
Why four lenses rather than a cycle
Unlike step-based models such as the Gibbs Reflective Cycle or Korthagen's ALACT, Brookfield's framework is not innately linear or circular. The four lenses are vantage points to be applied in any order and revisited, reflecting what Brookfield treats as the often unstructured, fractured nature of real critical reflection. The framework's purpose is less to discipline the act of reflecting than to ensure the teacher does not reflect from one perspective alone.
Position in the field
Critical reflection sits at the more sceptical end of the Reflective Practice tradition associated with Donald Schön (see Schon Reflection-in-Action). Schön focuses on the cognitive moves of practising professionals; Brookfield foregrounds the political and ideological assumptions embedded in teaching, drawing on adult-education and critical-pedagogy traditions. The two frameworks are complementary rather than competing.
References
- Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Jossey-Bass.
- Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a critically reflective teacher (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.