How can Reflective Practice help in a Care Working role?

Reflective Practice demands total, radical acceptance of every experience

Reflective practice in care work

In most formalized workplace settings, reflection is replaced by reactivity, and a focus on outputs; with reflection only really happening during the once-a-year performance review. Yes, it can often serve as the only opportunity to talk about person development and activity towards real progression — but another professional opinion may be that this isn’t healthy.

Reflection is a journey and a constant, demanding practice that isn’t too far away from meditation, although the aim is only for the clarity and acceptance of a specific event, as opposed to access to a higher or quieter consciousness as a lot of meditative practice is.

Reflective Practice for the workplace is required much more frequently, and ideally, informally as well as formally. Supportive workplaces encourage this, and sadly many do not. Luckily, this is inherently encouraged in Care Work.

Reflective Practice as real-time, self-performance and productivity review

In Care, the idea of Reflective Practice is both formal and informal, and designed completely around experiential learning, and carving out time to take all feedback — compliments, constructive critique, and suggestions — completely objectively, and to ‘squeeze the juice’ out of them to see what holds up and what can actually be used to make you an even higher performer:

from Cambridge International / University of Cambridge

What is Reflective Practice?

Reflective Practice is all about learning from experience, and learning after the experience. In HR or in tech, we might call this real-time learning and experiential learning.

Looking at particular areas of practice or experiences can help to integrate theory and practical activities at work, helping to produce more efficient and expert work. It involves the following processes, in a continuous virtuous circle:

1. Experience / Be Taught By What You Did or Achieved
2. Self-assess what was done
3. Consider new ways practicing, gather external support for your idea
4. Try these ideas in practice
5. Repeat the process

Having the opportunity to reflect on work, or listening to others reflect on their work, whether positively or negatively can enable a strong and sometimes emotional learning experience. The University of Cambridge on RP:

Reflective practice is ‘learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self and practice’ (Finlay, 2008).

Specifically, learning lessons from success is vital an equal to learning from failure and it is important in Care Work to keep both of those in balance when experienced on a personal as well as professional level.

There aren’t strict rules ere’s something I’ve come up with which takes about 5 minutes, designed to:

1. Take the hubris out of a good experience, and
2. To take the sting out of a bad one.

Reflective journaling is continuous improvement culture, as applied to your own career-learning journey. It helps shed any lingering feelings or ideas that might be overly negative or might evoke the idea of sitting on laurels.

But it also can’t just be ‘what could I do better’ Which it can sometimes be — but there should be as little ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as possible: all are actions, unless they harm.

Efficient Reflective Practice Workshop / Journal Idea:

1. Describe what happened in two sentences.
2. How did the experience feel honestly, in one sentence.
3. What made me act this way? Describe my thought process in two sentences or more if needed.
4. Did the situation make sense to me at the time; was it weird, new, or complex?
5. How could I make sense of something like this in the future?

Further Reading

Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.