Reflective Practice Tools for Educators
What they are
Cards of Insight is a CPD card set of 34 reflective prompt cards grounded in hermeneutic phenomenological research. Each card draws on in-depth inquiry into how educators actually experience the work of facilitating higher-order thinking in learners. The cards do not offer quick tips or generic frameworks. They offer windows into the lived complexity of teaching, learning and developing thinking at depth.
The cards are built around four subsets. Phenomenological themes, organised into five meaning clusters: intentionality, environment, identity, practice and self-management. Persona vignettes, which place you inside the experience of a range of distinct pedagogical approaches. Digital technology cards, exploring technology’s existential role in higher-order thinking development. And educator support cards, addressing the intellectual, emotional and physical demands of this work.
For Example
Each card has two sides. The face side introduces a concept, theme or vignette. The flip side offers additional insights, reflective prompts and discussion points. They are designed to be sat with, not rushed through.
The scholarly trail
The cards emerged from my doctoral research, later published as a Palgrave Macmillan monograph: Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Higher Education: An Ontological and Phenomenological Exploration (2026). The research underpinning the cards involved rigorous phenomenological analysis of educators’ lived experiences across higher education. The cards are the practitioner-facing instrument of that inquiry. They are not a simplification of the research. They are an extension of it into professional practice.
The methodology behind the cards, Immersive Practitioner Inquiry, treats the practitioner’s own experience as legitimate primary data. The cards invite the same orientation in their users.
Who uses them and how
The cards have been used in Masters level programmes, doctoral supervision contexts, CPD workshops, and international educator development settings including Malta, where they formed the basis of a structured reflective assignment across a cohort of practitioner educators. Educators have used individual cards as a mirror to their own practice, as prompts for structured group reflection, as starting points for peer dialogue about the hidden emotional and intellectual demands of teaching, and as tools for surfacing assumptions about learning that rarely get named in formal professional development.
One participant working with the cards put it this way: the cards are not just a way to label what you already do. They open up questions about where your discomfort lives, and what that tells you about yourself as a practitioner.
The cards are not discipline-specific. They have been used across education, leadership development, health and community contexts. As one Maltese educator observed: they apply not only to education but to almost any situation, because every one of us is a student and every one of us is an educator.
Where to find them
The Cards of Insight are published as an electronic format CPD card set, companion to the Palgrave Macmillan monograph.
They are available via the Springer Nature platform alongside the book: Developing Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Higher Education
Using them in your organisation or programme
If you are interested in using the Cards of Insight in a CPD programme, teaching module, leadership development context or professional learning community, get in touch to discuss how they could be adapted to your setting.
Contact: healeybenson-education@outlook.com
more here: https://emergentthinkers.com/2026/04/18/the-cards-of-insight-carried-returned-to-quietly-shifting/
Emergent Thinkers™ 