Given Hapunda

228 Introduction Critical reflection has gained ground in project management, monitoring and evaluation practice as an approach that can help project staff to maximise the impact or deliverables of the project. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to enliven, deepen our understanding of critical reflection, documenting lessons learnt and best practices in projects in order to maximise impact. Though this chapter is specially written for people working in monitoring and evaluation, the intended audience is broad and not limited to the former only. Project implementation staff and programme officers, managers and government employees interested in getting the best out of their projects or practice will find this chapter useful. (Perhaps the most important questions to ask ourselves is: what is critical reflection and when does one begin to critically reflect on action?). Critical reflection refers to stepping, back and examining our practice, ideas and challenges by asking ourselves probing questions. In other words, critical reflection in a project involves interpreting experiences and data to create new insights and agreements in action. Thus, critical reflection is a process, cognitive, emotional, and experiential of examining assumptions embedded in action or practice. Other scholars however, see critical reflection as a process of thinking, comparing and verifying for the purposes of learning, improving and changing practices (Fook & Gardner, 2007). Based on these definitions, it is clear that critical reflection involves:  Reflecting: Looking back and thinking about what has happened, what it means to the overall project goal or organisational goal and how to proceed.  Reflexivity: Challenging rules and assumptions about our processes and practices, modes of thinking of self and others.  New insight : Reflecting and reflexivity helps in bringing about collective learning and decision- making. Let us imagine that a donor has given you money to implement a project, “training women on how to write a Will before death” and you have been asked to choose an area within Lusaka where the project should be implemented “rich area i.e., AREA A” or poor areas i.e., AREA B. see Figure 1: