Reflective practice revisited: a culturally grounded model for Saudi EFL teachers

Reflective practice remains central to teacher development, yet dominant models have largely emerged from Western professional settings that privilege individualized reflection, low-stakes critique, and flexible pedagogical decision-making. This conceptual article reinterprets reflective practice for Saudi EFL teachers amid Vision 2030 reform, expanding professional-learning expectations, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence integration. It advances a culturally grounded model combining three foundational lenses – post-structuralism, sociocultural theory, and critical theory – with three implementation perspectives: activity theory, transformative learning, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. These perspectives conceptualize reflection as critical, collaborative, ethically responsive, and contextually situated. Drawing on classical and contemporary scholarship, the article identifies constraints extending beyond educational centralization, including evaluative risk, hierarchical interactional norms, language-identity tensions, and the mediation of reform through local cultural and religious values. The model integrates five recursive processes: personal reflective inquiry, collaborative dialogue, contextual analysis, integration of cultural and religious values, and action planning. Illustrative enactments and institutional supports include protected reflective spaces, coaching, feedback channels, and ethically informed AI-enabled tools. The article argues that reflective practice becomes more meaningful and sustainable when professional growth is anchored in local values, collegial trust, contextual responsiveness, and bounded teacher agency.