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What Is Reflective Practice

This document discusses reflective practice, which is actively examining one's own experiences to generate learning. Reflecting on challenges, uncertainties, and successes can provide insights. Reflective practice can be done individually or collectively and at different frequencies and depths depending on the goal. It is a way to improve work processes and outcomes through better understanding experiences.

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29 views7 pages

What Is Reflective Practice

This document discusses reflective practice, which is actively examining one's own experiences to generate learning. Reflecting on challenges, uncertainties, and successes can provide insights. Reflective practice can be done individually or collectively and at different frequencies and depths depending on the goal. It is a way to improve work processes and outcomes through better understanding experiences.

Uploaded by

michealfrancesreycamanzie
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is reflective practice

Article · January 2004

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Joy Amulya
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What is Reflective
Practice?
Joy Amulya
Senior Associate
Community Science

Community Science 0 May 2011


What is Reflective Practice?
Joy Amulya
Senior Associate, Community Science

Reflection: the foundation of purposeful learning

Reflection is an active process of witnessing one’s own experience in order to


take a closer look at it, sometimes to direct attention to it briefly, but often to explore it
in greater depth. This can be done in the midst of an activity or as an activity in itself.
The key to reflection is learning how to take perspective on one’s own actions and
experience—in other words, to examine that experience rather than just living it. By
developing the ability to explore and be curious about our own experience and actions,
we suddenly open up the possibilities of purposeful learning — learning derived not
from books or experts, but from our work and our lives. This is the purpose of reflective
practice: to generate learning from experience, whether that is the experience of a
meeting, a project, a disaster, a success, a challenging interaction, or any other event,
before, during or after it has occurred.

Challenging experiences create particularly powerful opportunities for learning using


reflective practice. Different kinds of challenges open up different kinds of learning:

 Reflecting on struggles opens a window onto what is working and not working,
and can lead to a greater understanding of the true nature of a challenge we are
facing.
 Some struggles arise from dilemmas, a clash between our values and an
approach we are using in our work. Reflecting on dilemmas generates
information about what is clashing, and can lead to adjusting our actions to
better align with our values.
 Reflecting on experiences of uncertainty (for example, when starting a project or
dealing with a new kind of problem) illuminates the specific ways in which the
approach we are taking is not defined, not concrete, or perhaps not feasible. In
that case, reflective practice can point to the need for either problem-solving or
acceptance of what is not defined or concrete or not realistic.

Positive experiences are also powerful sources of learning for a reflective


practitioner. For example:

 Reflecting on breakthroughs (either in our actions or our thinking) helps us


uncover practices and processes that lead us to success. A study on scientific

Community Science 1 May 2011


breakthroughs1 showed they often occur after periods of low activity and
discouragement. Examining a breakthrough and what came before it can reveal
what we were concretely doing (practices) and how we were doing it (process)
so that we can recreate the “flow” of focus and engagement2 that led to
success. By gaining insight into the conditions that allow our creativity to
flourish, we become more purposeful about how to work in more creative and
satisfying ways.
 Reflection on successes can also instruct us on a deeper level of our assumptions
and definitions of success. What underlying set of ideas and approaches informs
our work when it is most effective? Is this consistent, or at odds, with how
success is defined in our work environment? Too often, busy front line
practitioners (nurses, social workers, community organizers, etc.) feel scattered
and are prone to burnout. By reflecting on successes and uncovering the
framework of action and values that leads to success, practitioners and
organizations can regain a sense of coherence and focus amid the many things
that clamor for their attention.

By becoming more purposeful about our learning through reflection on practice, we


become more purposeful in our work and our lives.

Practicing Reflection: how often, how much and why

Reflective practice is simply creating a habit, structure, or routine around


examining experience. A practice for reflection can vary in terms of how often, how
much, and why reflection gets done. At one end of the spectrum, a work group could go
on an extended annual retreat and spend many days documenting and analyzing the
learning that has emerged from their past year of work. At the other end, an individual
could reflect throughout the day, bringing a high level of awareness to her thoughts and
actions in the moment without stopping to analyze her actions and thinking at a broader
level.

This comparison points to the diverse ways that reflective practice can be done:

1. Reflection can be practiced at different frequencies: every day, every month, every
year.
2. Reflection can also vary in depth, from a quick pause to notice what happened and
didn’t happen during a meeting, to a sustained examination and documentation of
critical moments during a project.
3. Reflection can serve a variety of purposes:
 It can be individually useful, to become more aware of what guides our patterns
of action and thinking, and what we struggle with and feel successful about.
1
Maini, S. & Nordbeck, B. (1972). Critical moments in research work. A study of research workers in the
Behavioural Sciences. Psychological Research Bulletin, 12, 10, Lund University, Sweden.
2
Csikszentmihayli & Nakamura, Mihaly & Jeanne (2002). The Concept of Flow. The Handbook of Positive
Psychology: Oxford University Press, pp. 89-92.

Community Science 2 May 2011


 Reflective practice can be aimed at the purpose of making the work of a team
more effective and innovative through ongoing capture of learning and making
changes to have a greater impact.3
 It can be used by departments, agencies, or organizations for the purpose of
bringing greater alignment between activities, relationships, and deeper values.
 Reflection can be used to strengthen shared thinking, or to expose the
framework underlying a complex body of work.

All of these purposes are similar in that they lead to greater understanding of the
work people are doing alone or together. Without reflection, innovation and optimal
impact are not possible – reflection is essential for improving both the process and
outcome of our work.

Designing a practice of reflection means first identifying a purpose or goal, then


locating the best opportunities for embedding reflective practice in our work that are
realistic and yet occur at the right intervals and with sufficient depth to be meaningful.
The bottom line is that it has to be doable. Getting started and maintaining a practice of
reflection at a manageable level, however small, transforms the possibility of learning
from our work into a reality.

Collective vs. individual reflective practice

If reflective practice “illuminates what the self and others have experienced,”4 is
this an individual or collective activity? It can be either; individuals and groups alike can
engage in reflective practice related to their work. Whether you choose to learn from
experience at the individual or on a group level depends on your learning agenda. Is an
organization interested in documenting the learning embedded in its work over the past
several months? If so, the experiences its members focus on and the questions they
pursue in their reflection process will be about their collective practice. Does an
individual need to make sense out of a week’s worth of meetings, frustrations, and
turning points in order to decide how to proceed with a project? Then she might explore
her experience of the significant moments and key issues that are connected to the
decision she needs to make.

Individual and collective reflection need not be sequestered from one another—
in fact, they can be mutually supportive within an overall learning process. For example:

 Individual practitioners who wish to strengthen their work can form a


reflective practice group. Each person takes a turn recounting a key event

3
For example, see Innovating for Social Impact, a framework developed by Community Science
(http://www.communityscience.com) to strengthen organizational learning and impact.
4
Raelin, J (2002). “I Don’t Have Time to Think!” versus the Art of Reflective Practice. In Reflections, vol. 4,
1, 66-79, Society for Organizational Learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Community Science 3 May 2011


and getting feedback on analyzing it, naming assumptions, making
connections, and formulating critical questions that emerge.
 In an organizational or team learning process, individual members identify
significant events from their own role or perspective. Then the group
engages in collective learning through exploring the connections across these
perspectives.

A reflection process is oriented differently according to specific learning needs,


but relies on the dynamics of a group. And although any reflection process is about
inquiry into experience in order to learn, each is driven by different kinds of questions
and will yield different kinds of insights. Reflection focused on individual experience
supports the development of how a practitioner thinks and takes action, whereas
reflection oriented around collective work supports organizational impact.

Reflective practice is driven by questions, dialogue, and stories

Reflective practice is fundamentally structured around inquiry. It’s easier to


recognize the importance of allocating time to reflect when it is viewed as a way to gain
visibility on an urgent problem or need. To do this, we need to analyze experiences that
are relevant to that problem or need. The most powerful “technologies” for examining
experience are storytelling (narrative accounts of experience) and dialogue (thinking out
loud together). Journaling is parallel to storytelling and dialogue at the individual level –
it lets us capture and analyze our own experience and thinking.

Storytelling and dialogue are effective technologies for reflective practice


because they are cognitively complex and culturally powerful systems for conveying the
way we think about, feel about, and make connections within our experience.

 By examining a story we tell about a significant event, we build our


understanding of what happened and why.
 By engaging in collective dialogue about an event from multiple perspectives, a
group can look at the meanings it has taken from that experience and excavate
the qualities that made it significant.

Even when there is not a clear problem or question driving reflection, it is through the
exploration of stories and the practice of dialogue that we can unpack the richness of
experience, and evaluate which issues emerging from that experience we need to
pursue. Using reflection, we can identify learning edges – those questions or issues that
an individual or group needs to understand in order to improve the impact of their
work.

Why name reflection? Why not just let it happen?

In the world of work, there are enormous opportunities to learn, yet relatively
few structures that support learning from experience, particularly in adulthood and in

Community Science 4 May 2011


the context of work. Every adult reflects to some degree, and everyone, no matter their
field, hypothesizes and draws conclusions from the “data” of their experience.
Nevertheless, most fields of work do not provide the infrastructure of methods,
practices, and processes for building knowledge from practice.

For many practitioners, “doing” swallows up learning. Even doing our best to
stay aware of what we are doing does not by itself create high-impact learning. Learning
is a purposeful activity. It does not have to be a complicated activity. Recognizing the
necessary role of reflection in getting the learning out of experience and becoming
familiar with the basic elements of reflective practice allows practitioners to “know
what they know” from the experience of their work, and to realize the power of this
source of knowledge in furthering their work.

For more about reflection as a tool in organizational learning systems, read about Innovating for
Social Impact at http://www.communityscience.com or contact Joy Amulya at
[email protected] for more information.

Community Science 5 May 2011

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