Reflective Practice E-Book

Janet Hargreaves

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Themes in Health and Social Care
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Reflective practice is an essential skill for those working in health and social care, but why is it so vital and how can it be learned? As inter-disciplinary working becomes more common, finding shared ways of reflection on practice are becoming more and more important. How do we share our ideas and thoughts to enrich both professionals and their client base?

This book uses stories and exercises to enable readers to develop their skills. Its emphasis is on the practical, from how to construct a reflective essay to the ethical ambiguities of whistleblowing and constructing a professional persona.

The book is written with the needs of students of health and social care in mind. For those who want to develop their skills beyond the scope of the book, each chapter ends by with a step-up suggestion enabling them to build on what they have already learned.

Leseprobe

Reflective Practice

Key Themes in Health and Social Care series

Nick J. Fox, The Body

Reflective Practice

JANET HARGREAVES AND LOUISE PAGE

polity

Copyright © Janet Hargreaves and Louise Page 2013

The right of Janet Hargreaves and Louise Page to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-5694-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Figures

Tables

Boxes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1.  Reflection in context: what this book is all about

  2.  The context of reflective practice: choosing an approach that works for you

  3.  The Reflective Timeline

  4.  Writing reflection for assessment: the individual voice

  5.  Reflecting together: the collective voice

  6.  Expressing reflection in other ways

  7.  Reflective practice is ethical practice

  8.  Asking difficult questions – exploring reflection in challenging situations

  9.  Is reflection always a good thing? Arguments and evidence

10.  Conclusion: embedding reflection – looking forward

References

Index

Figures

1.1  The cliff top and the swamp (adapted from Schön, 1991).

2.1  The top ten picture.

3.1  An inter-professional circle.

3.2  First thoughts.

3.3  Reflection in the moment.

4.1  Gibbs’ reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1988).

4.2  So what are you thinking?

5.1  Group reflection.

6.1  A Knickerbocker Glory.

7.1  The four arenas of accountability (Dimond, 2008).

8.1  Factors affecting whistle blowing (adapted from Miceli & Near, 2002).

9.1  Flow diagram of a learning experience using constructive alignment (after Biggs, 2006).

Tables

1.1  Skill acquisition from novice to expert (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2009).

2.1  Learning styles (adapted from Fleming, 2001; Honey & Mumford, 1992).

2.2  The top ten quick-view list.

4.1  The essay timeline.

5.1  Group reflection checklist.

7.1  Case studies: issues and actions.

Boxes

4.1  Golden rules for reflective writing.

8.1  Margaret Haywood.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book together has been a great journey, uniting our different experiences and ideas. It has been helped by encouragement and critique from family and friends, in particular Richard Hargreaves, who has patiently drafted and re-drafted the original diagrams and made, photographed and helped to eat the Knickerbocker Glory.

Introduction

This book is written for students and qualified professionals who want to extend their knowledge, skills and understanding of reflective practice. This book does not seek to focus on any one discipline, because reflection is shared by all professional groups. It is written by Janet, an academic with nursing qualifications, and Louise, a professional writer with academic support experience. We both use reflection in our teaching and everyday life. We are sure that reflective practice can have a positive and confidence-boosting role in all aspects of professional learning and will illustrate this through the stories in the book.

Looking at the literature, every health and social care discipline has a motivation for using reflection. Development of life-long learning is highlighted for medical students (Barley, 2012) as the vast knowledge base required for practice cannot all be learned and remembered, but this sentiment is true of all professions as research and legislation leads to rapid change: all of us need the ability to find things out for ourselves and learn from our experience. Understanding how to learn is explored in most detail in the literature from teacher education, and so we draw on this regularly throughout the book. The development of empathy and self-awareness also features in many justifications for the teaching of reflective practice, for example in health care (Bulman & Schutz, 2008), social work (Brookfield, 2009) medicine and dentistry (Brett-MacLean, Cave, Yiu, Kelner & Ross, 2010; Brown, 2010).

In different ways, the literature suggests that reflection and reflective practice help professionals to develop and critique their own practice. By deliberately choosing literature that comes from as many professional viewpoints from health and social care as we could find, as well as teacher education, we hope to show the universality of the concepts involved. What became clear to us was that each profession values reflection and reflective practice in different ways. For many of the texts written about medicine and dentistry, reflection was promoted as a necessary tool for helping with complex decision making and with the tension between the clinical and the personal. For teachers it seems to be more cerebral; a process that helps teachers to learn to learn, and thus to help others. For health and social work, intuitive and self-reflective behaviour is already assumed so there is more focus on deeper personal reflection and critical reflection, looking at the socio-political aspects of practice. This difference seemed helpful and enlightening to us, reflecting perhaps the discourses identified by Mantzoukas & Watkinson who say: ‘In the process of learning a discipline, individuals have to be able to differentiate themselves from others while remaining part of a social context’ (Mantzoukas & Watkinson, 2008, p. 130).

Using a series of examples and templates, we will guide you through reflective practice in a variety of situations. Our emphasis is on practicalities. We recognize that the majority of people in health and social care disciplines are ‘hands on’ and kinaesthetic learners. Sharing stories is a powerful tool for learning. Using stories and drawing on academic literature, we have collected ideas, exercises and theoretical situations to develop skills for the learning, understanding and recording of reflective practice. We feel that reflective practice is strongly linked to ethics and professional judgement, so these feature throughout the book, not as add-ons, but embedded in everyday reflection.

In chapters 1, 2 and 3, we introduce you to reflection and reflective practice, including background, models and a time-line for development.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 look at three different ‘how to’ aspects: Introduction writing reflection, particularly where you might need to write for an academic assessment; reflecting in groups; and reflecting in other ways, such as through walking, and using the environment around you.

Chapters 7 and 8 take reflection in different directions. Chapter 7 looks at situations where an individual professional may be in trouble, and the ways in which reflection can help to avoid, and recover from, personal difficulties. Chapter 8 looks at the awkward, dangerous questions that reflection can lead to, and how you might manage these in practice.

Chapter 9 offers some of the cases against and barriers to reflection: the arguments that it is ‘just thinking’, makes no difference to practice and cannot be assessed are reviewed and suggestions made.

Finally, we conclude by bringing together the themes of the book and our personal reflection on writing it.

CHAPTER ONE

Reflection in context: what this book is all about

Chapter Summary

Reflection is promoted for effective development in every professional code and educational course that you will come across in your career. This chapter will set the scene for the book; locating reflective practice within the recent historical development of professional education. Through studying this chapter and engaging in the exercises, you will be able to:

•  discuss the place of reflective practice in professional education

•  identify the significance of storytelling to understanding practice

•  make connections between your personal beliefs, your practice and major ethical theories

•  reflect on the application of reflective skills to your own professional practice and development.

Introduction

What does it mean to reflect, or to be a ‘reflective practitioner’? Is it innate, a personal way of being or learning style? Alternatively, is it something you can learn, develop and improve?

In this book, we are going to help you to discover what reflective practice is, to develop your reflective abilities, to express your reflection in ways that other people can understand and to successfully demonstrate your reflection when used for assessment. Throughout this book, we do not have any particular profession in mind. Louise is not qualified in any health or social care profession; she has worked with and supported health and social care students, and writes plays about health and illness. Janet is a nurse by background; she works in higher education in a multi-professional setting. We draw on literature from health, medicine, social work, dentistry and education, in fact from any discipline that we think adds to understanding and offers useful ideas. Naturally, we draw on our own experience but we use stories and illustrations from many professional viewpoints, in order to demonstrate that reflection crosses inter-professional language and practice.