Description: Whilst Gibbs and Coffey (2000) have identified a range of developmental aspirations for academic development programmes implemented in response to the now well-established policy agenda on professional standards in the UK and mirrored in other Anglophone higher education systems, the rationale of reflective practice, either stated explicitly or implied in the language of programme specifications or handbooks, dominates the stated aims of many of postgraduate certificates in higher education learning and teaching or academic practice. Indeed some have argued that the concept of the reflective practitioner has assumed the "veneer of educational orthodoxy" (Clegg, 2000: 451; Ecclestone, 1996) as the pervasive paradigm of professional development within higher education. This is despite ongoing claims that the repeatedly cited concept of reflection within teacher development lacks rigour within this context, that there are actually varied conceptualisations of reflection and reflective practice and that there is a lack of theorising of how these conceptualisations relate to each other. Donald Schön's model of the reflective practitioner, the rationale that Gibbs and Coffey found to be the dominant theoretical position adopted, explicitly or implicitly, by trainers on academic development programmes codifies reflective practice into two different and temporally-defined phases of expertise: reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action (Schön, 1991[1983]). Whilst reflection-on-action is retrospective, Schön perceives the professional reflective practitioner as enacting reflection-in-action in the midst of practice. Accepting the ultimate ambivalence of Schön's terminology, such distinctions nevertheless imply that the experienced professional continually modifies practice as it happens constituting a near and ideal simultaneity between the action, the reflection and the re-action, where thinking and acting coincide. Cowan has argued that reflection in the midst of action changes action whilst reflection after action changes the perception of action (Cowan, 1998). However, attempts both to stimulate and record the process of reflection through critical reflective portfolios frequently privilege deliberative, linear constructions of knowledge about practice that cannot convey the complexities of reflection as a tool for constructing and reconstructing an understanding of changing practice within time. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the established discourses of reflective practice specifically in relation to conceptions of linear time (past, present and future) and critical narrative with the view to expanding the definitions of the theory and application of the reflective practitioner model. Methodology: For this conceptual research paper the methodology for the analysis is within an interpretative paradigm. Through a qualitative analysis of the discourses of reflection in the conceptualisation of the reflective practitioner in higher educational research and policy, this paper identifies and questions the validity of key interlocking assumptions about time and narrative that underpin the orthodox model of reflective practice. Acknowledging Habermas' caveat, it is recognised that such an approach requires sensitivity to the nuances of the analysed discourses whilst also applying self-conscious reflexivity to the discourses that this analysis itself produces (Cohen et al., 2000). Conclusions: As an exploratory research paper, the intended outcome is to problematise the privileging of a construction of knowledge of professional teaching practice through the chronological narrative framework of critical reflective portfolio.