Reflection is a natural process, a capacity that everyone has that involves persisting with enquiry into a concept or question seeking a reasonable answer or hypothesis that may feed into more rigorous forms of enquiry (such as research). Nevertheless, if we don’t value the product of personal enquiry, if all we ever value is ‘what … More Reflection: ‘the art of using science’

Scientists embracing the philosophical perspective of positivism often seek objectivity, fact and truth while trying to avoid contaminating their results with intuition and personal bias. This is commendable and relevant for hard sciences where tangible measurements are taken from physical things, but it can be limiting, to the extent that personal biases always exist and … More Reflexivity

Habermas’ idea of intersubjective agreement establishes the idea that triangulation of subjective views between individuals to achieve consensus is a preferred method of achieving an equivalent construct of validity within his theory of communicative action. This is in contrast to instrumental action that aims at control over the natural environment, isolating variables and observing the … More A brief reflection on communicative action and the barriers to achieving true consensus

As scientists we are taught to be factual and limit personal interpretation. But social scientists aim to understand people and as such doing so without the ability to imagine and be creative [i.e. infer connections between knowledge] is simply unrealistic. To empathise we need to be able to reach outside of our own perspectives and … More Communication as the basis of learning: out with debate and in with discussion

I was talking to my partner this morning about how cultures differ and lead to characteristic ways of being with others. The culture we grow up in has a huge effect on the way we view the world as the implicit learning from cues around us slowly construct a particular way of generally viewing the … More Challenging experientially reinforced negative worldviews through reflection

I often like to think of analogies that capture the inherent complexity of an idea and present it in such a way that it is relatable to a wider audience. It is hypothesised by some [e.g. Lakoff, Chomsky, Mezirow, Habermas] that we learn communicatively through analogies and metaphors [e.g. we relate what is new to … More Reflection: refocussing the lens

Some have criticised the notion of reflection as ‘reinforcing beliefs’ as we never truly think outside of the box. My take on this is that it is true, we never think outside of what we already know [naturally] but by focussing enquiry on the underlying premises of our beliefs we can begin to understand and … More The new and the known

Reflection has been defined as “bringing together of ideas to create new insight through ongoing cycles of expression and re/evaluation” (Marshall, 2019. p.411) acknowledging that reflection is a form of cognitive enquiry that is facilitated by expressing ideas clearly in words so that they are open to the possibilities of being re-examined either by oneself … More The use of scaffolding in question posing to focus and integrate enquiry [facilitating reflective thinking]

I consider the idea of expertise to imply consistently effective decision making [and unproblematic decision making]. If this is the case then I believe that expertise does not and cannot exist in the real world but is an idealised notion to work towards and measure performance against. Therefore, expertise is an inherently problematic socially constructed … More Expertise

Was thinking about the term ‘athlete-centred coaching’ (ACC) during a bit of reflection this morning following a discussion with a swim coach. Have been considering what this actually means and how a coach will decide whether to be ‘athlete-centred’. I personally consider ACC to be philosophically driven by a coaches epistemological beliefs (beliefs of how … More Reflecting on athlete-centred coaching