Professional educators build their own praxis, i.e. their own theory of practice. Through reflection on their own teaching and learning, they weave theory and practice together and create the fabric of their own cultural practice of teaching and learning. Good educators know how to practice theory and theorize practice, they care about human growth, they teach for students’ learning to lead to development.

Although reflective practice is claimed to be important, “teacher-proof” scripted curricula, however, and related reforms centered on testing, now often focus teacher reflection on efficient technical implementation rather than on inquiry and meaning-making. Most often, reflection is thus deemed an isolated technical skill. More than ever, the craft of teaching requires the acceptance of ambiguity, and engagement in active meaning-making. In the context of growing diversity, moral uncertainty, conflicting intellectual demands and views on teaching and learning, teachers’ reflection as a mere ability to implement the pre-packaged curriculum is insufficient to support meaningful educational practice. Also, for teachers engaged in reflective practice as self-emancipation and inquiry it supports their ability to facilitate students’ classroom inquiry.

As a Vygotskian scholar, I consider reflection as a higher psychological function that is socially constructed in the course of culturally mediated human activities. Reflection is socially constructed, because it is first developed in the form of shared cognition among the community of learners and then transformed through the process of internalization into individual consciousness. Reflective practice, like any other human activity, is mediated by cultural tools. Reflection is a human ability of the agent of the action to be self-conscious. It is the ability to regard oneself or one’s own action as the other, as the subject of purposeful change. It is meta-cognitive since it requires thinking about thinking. Thus, reflection is manifest through our cognition and practice, developed in the course of specific socio-cultural interactions, and influenced by our attitudes and moral values.

On the basis of my research findings, I argue that continuous teachers’ reflective practice is vital for ongoing inquiry and learning about their practice and, therefore, their development as professionals capable of critical inquiry and transformation of their own practice. Certain conditions are necessary for the development of teachers’ reflective practice. Since professional teachers’ reflection is part of the craft of teaching, teachers must learn how to reflect on practice, the array of mediational means of reflection, and ways of developing psychological tools of reflection (narrative, schema, dialog, etc.) that mediate their thinking about practice and help to conceptualize it. They need to know what the process of reflective action entails, and possibilities and limitations of various ways of reflection. To meet the needs of diverse students, teachers need to be educated how to identify the problem in practice and the matching mediational means to reflect on it. Since reflection as a higher psychological function develops in the course of social interaction, teachers should have an opportunity to belong to a community of inquiry that offers continuous reflective dialog to construct emergent meanings, challenge existing understandings, and conceptualize practice. There is a dialectical relationship between the level of the development of reflection and teacher’s agency. The more developed the teacher’s reflective practice is, the better is the ability to conceptualize her own practice and transform it into praxis, the stronger is the ownership of one’s own approaches to teaching and learning, the teacher’s agency in continuous meaning-making.

In higher education, as many educational leaders and faculty expect their students to engage in reflective practice as a natural ability of the mind, the former need to be educated in reflective practice as a professional learning activity.