Reflexive competence and reflection

Vast volumes of South African educational documents highlight the following four competencies (paraphrased from http://www.citehr.com/14370-competency-mapping-urgent.html) of which two mention reflexive/reflexivity:

1.      Practical competency             A person's demonstrated ability to perform a specified set of tasks.

2.      Foundational competence    A person's demonstrated understanding of what and why she (he) is doing.

3.      Reflexive competence       A person's ability to integrate actions with the understanding of the action so that she (he) learn from those actions and adapts to the changes as and when they are required.

4.      Applied competence              A person's demonstrated ability to perform a set of tasks with understanding and reflexivity.

In this regard I found the Peter Jarvis’ (Source: http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-explrn.htm) model, which illustrates several different potential responses/routes to a potential learning situation. The routes are summarised in terms of grades of learning in a table below.

Donald Clark (http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/development/reflection.html) highlights four types of writing; the first one is non-reflective, while the other three are characterized as different kinds of reflection:

·        Descriptive writing (not reflective) reports events. Its main purpose is to provide a support or a starting point for the framework.

·        Descriptive reflection attempts to provide reasons based upon personal judgment, e.g., "I choose this problem solving activity because I believe the learners should be active rather than passive."

·        Dialogic reflection forms a discourse with one's self through the exploration of possible reasons. e.g., "I became aware that a number of students did not respond to written text materials. Thinking about this, there may have been several reasons. A number of students may still have lacked some confidence in handling the level of language in the text. "

·        Critical reflection involves giving reasons for decisions or events, which takes into account the broader historical, social and/or political contexts.