The importance of reflection in higher education and across disciplinary fields is widely recognised and it is generally included in university graduate attributes, professional standards and programme objectives. Furthermore, reflection is commonly embedded into assessment requirements in higher education subjects, often without necessary scaffolding or clear expectations for students. Despite the rhetoric around the importance of reflection for ongoing learning, there is scant literature on any systematic, developmental approach to teaching reflective learning across higher education programmes/courses. Given that professional or academic reflection is not intuitive, and requires specific pedagogic intervention to do well, a programme/course-wide approach is essential. This paper draws on current literature to theorise a new, transferable and customisable model for teaching and assessing reflective learning across higher education, which foregrounds and explains the pedagogic field of higher education as a multi-dimensional space. We argue that explicit and strategic pedagogic intervention, supported by dynamic resources, is necessary for successful, broad-scale approaches to reflection in higher education.

Despite the common use of the term reflection in higher education assessment tasks, learners are not often taught how to communicate their disciplinary knowledge through reflection. This paper argues that students can and should be taught how to reflect in deep and transformative ways. It highlights the reflexive pedagogical balancing act of attending to different levels of reflection as a way to stimulate focused, thoughtful and reasoned reflections that show evidence of new ways of thinking and doing. The paper uses data from a current project to illustrate the effects of focusing on particular levels of reflection in the pedagogical strategies used, and argues that while the goal of academic or professional reflection is generally to move students to the highest level of reflection to transform their learning/practice, unless higher education teachers attend to every level of reflection, there are specific, observable gaps in the reflections that students produce.

Reflective skills are widely regarded as a means of improving students' lifelong learning and professional practice in higher education (Rogers 2001). While the value of reflective practice is widely accepted in educational circles, a critical issue is that reflective writing is complex, and has high rhetorical demands, making it difficult to master unless it is taught in an explicit and systematic way. This paper argues that a functional–semantic approach to language (Eggins 2004), based on Halliday's (1978) systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can be used to develop a shared language to explicitly teach and assess reflective writing in higher-education courses. The paper outlines key theories and scales of reflection, and then uses SFL to develop a social semiotic model for reflective writing. Examples of reflective writing are analysed to show how such a model can be used explicitly to improve the reflective writing skills of higher-education students.

There is increasing evidence to show that teachers' epistemic cognition is related to how they conceive of and engage in teaching; therefore it is important that teachers develop adaptive epistemic cognition. This article provides an overview of the different ways of theorizing and investigating changes in epistemic cognition for teaching and learning. A growing body of research shows that explicit reflection on epistemic cognition may be a useful way to promote change. Drawing on the work of Lunn Brownlee and Schraw and the Advanced Study Colloquium group described in the introduction to this special issue, we extend the concept of explicit reflection to encompass reflexive thinking. Reflexivity involves critical thinking that evaluates multiple perspectives in context and leads to specific action in the classroom. The 3R-EC Framework (Reflection, Reflexivity and Resolved Action for Epistemic Cognition) for theorizing change in epistemic cognition is described and exemplified in the contexts of classroom practice and teachers' professional learning.

Reflection is not a new concept in the teaching of higher education and is often an important component of many disciplinary courses. Despite this, past research shows that while there are examples of rich reflective strategies used in some areas of higher education, most approaches to, and conceptualisations of, reflective learning and assessment have been perfunctory and inconsistent. In many disciplinary areas, reflection is often assessed as a written activity ‘tagged onto’ assessment practices. In creative disciplines, however, reflective practice is an integral and cumulative form of learning and is often expressed in ways other than in the written form. This paper will present three case studies of reflective practice in the area of Creative Industries in higher education – Dance, Fashion and Music. It will discuss the ways in which higher education teachers and students use multimodal approaches to expressing knowledge and reflective practice in such a context. The paper will argue that unless students are encouraged to participate in deep reflective disciplinary discourse via multi-modes then reflection will remain superficial in the higher education context.

In the current climate of accountability, political manoeuvring, changing curriculum, increasingly diverse student cohorts and community expectations, teachers, more than ever, need to develop the skills and abilities to be reflective and reflexive practitioners. This study examines national teacher professional standards from Australia and the UK to identify the extent to which reflexivity is embedded in key policy documents that are intended to guide the work of teachers in those countries. Using Margaret Archer's theories of reflexivity and morphogenesis, and methods of critical discourse analysis, we argue that these blueprints for teachers’ work exclude reflexivity as an essential and overarching discourse of teacher professionalism.