Thing 5: Reflective Practice

After falling massively behind on my things, this week will hopefully see a big push to catch up.

After hearing people talk about chartership recently, the reflective practice aspect is something I find quite daunting. I've read peoples blog posts on this so far and briefly read around the subject in the past so its not so much the process, it's the doing.

I may have mentioned before that my workplace have regular staff development hours, here we are encouraged (it's a requirement) to keep a log which is usefully structured to include what you enjoyed, why and how you can apply it etc. In fact the more I think about it, reflective practice has been part of my education for years, I now recall GCSE and A Level projects where including what went well, what didn't, how you would improve it formed a large part of the assessment.

I think one reason why I see this as a challenge is time related. With staff development hour logs, I struggle to  write it up too soon after the training because for me their hasn't been enough time to process or apply what I learnt. I think we are all reflective practitioners by our very nature, we wouldn't have survived as a species if not I'm sure. Cliche alert - I like to live in the moment! It's only at the point where you need to draw on the experience (success/failure) of a prior event that it has value. So receiving training etc, formally writing what I learnt has rather baffled me. I guess I need that interview jeopardy - "Tell us about a time...what was the outcome?....