Critical Incident Analysis

Background

As with a number of approaches, critical incident analysis has largely been explored in school teaching but it has applications to all types of teaching and learning. David Tripp (1993), in his book on critical incident analysis puts it simply - when something goes wrong, we need to ask what happened and what caused it to happen. The guiding principle is to frame incidents as questions. Thus 'students always come late to my class' changes to 'why do students always come late to my class? In this way, critical incidents can become turning points and lead to changes to our understanding. In asking 'why did I do that?' or 'why did I let them do that?' we are working on the values in our practice.