Reflective practice - Thing 5

Finally getting round to Thing 5. Hopefully Things 6 and 7 from this week won't be too far behind.

Reflective practice as a concept has always been fuzzy for me, and I think that I have maybe subconsciously put off starting this task as I had an idea in the back of my head that it was incredibly time-consuming and therefore a bit of a chore. So, I approached this hoping for a moment of clarity and a plan for the future.

What have I done?

I enjoyed reading the blog entry on the CPD23 website. It took away a lot of the aura surrounding the subject for me and left me feeling a bit more confident about how I could apply reflective practice to my professional life.

What have I learnt?
I liked iterative 'do-review-plan-do' cycle but recognize that it's probably a bit simplistic. I need to do further reading/exploration to really get to grips with the concept in a meaningful way. I have always kept a log of 'what I am doing' to help with appraisals and identify professional development needs, and have in my mind considered and analyzed and drawn conclusions, but have been missing the structure of writing and planning actions based upon this. I have already found with this blog that it is good practice in focussing the mind and trying to convey my thoughts succinctly (not altogether succeeded with this yet!). I'm not sure that I would want to use it for all future reflective writing though, as I don't know that it's necessary to publish my thoughts on everything I do at work to the world. But I definitely can see that the format is useful.

So, having reflected a little, how am I going to apply this in the future?

Plans
I hope to make more time for reflective writing and ways of working in the future, but will need to be pragmatic about this, of course. Having made time for the CPD program itself, I have learnt that time is there, but it takes discipline and self-motivation.

I'm going to investigate some online tools to help with reflective writing, and have also identified a few books on our library shelves from the CPD further reading list. Ideally, I may be able to develop my offline work log into something more reflective, building upon descriptions of what I have done, to include written evaluation and action points.