In this chapter, I describe in more detail the three kinds of reflective interventions that I designed for the purpose of giving my participating teachers a chance to engage in the recursive and complex activity of reflective practice. The chapter shows how the three interventions made the teachers become aware or reinterpret their reflective themes. As I stated in Chapter 3, I chose three very different kinds of interventions because I wanted to offer various modalities to the participants in the hopes that each person would find at least one ‘safe’ space where they would feel comfortable expressing their feelings, beliefs and reactions, in other words, their honne.

It was not possible for me to discern if a teacher’s statement was honne or tatema, and it is likely that this was not possible for the participant teachers either. At the same time, I do not think that we can definitively categorise every statement to be honne or tatema; probably it is not necessary to do so. However, I think I can argue with some confidence that the reflective interventions gave participants opportunities to express what they wanted to say rather than what they thought they should say and also to ponder the differences between the two.

In the following pages, I discuss the benefits and also the challenges raised by each of the three interventions referring to the five types of reflection I introduced in Chapter 4. It does not mean, however, that one intervention can be identified as leading a participant to awareness or reinterpretation.