Using critical reflection to prepare practitioners for work with infants and toddlers (original) (raw)
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Reflective practice has become an influential concept in various forms of professional education, for example, in nursing and social work. However, there has been a common tendency for it to be oversimplified in practice, and, furthermore, dominant understandings of reflective practice can themselves be criticised for lacking theoretical sophistication in some respectsparticularly in relation to the social and political dimensions of learning and professional practice. This paper therefore seeks to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of reflective practice and to propose developments in relation to the missing sociological elements. It briefly reviews current dominant understandings of reflective practice before proposing developments in the theory base to make it more theoretically sophisticated in general and more sociologically informed in particular. In this way, the foundations for a critically reflective practice are sketched out.
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Recent concern over the standard of social work practice, as evidenced by inquiries into child abuse cases, have led to something of a crisis in trust in the profession. As a result, there is now an emphasis on increasing practitioners' competency to practice in complex situations. Critical reflection is seen as key to achieving this increase in competence, and is stressed in both professional guidance and educational policy. National standards for continuing professional development encapsulated in post-qualifying social work awards formalise the processes of reflection on practice and learning through reflection. While most literature concentrates on reflection within the context of educational courses, the research presented in this article describes the extent to which practitioners use reflective and critical thinking skills in everyday practice. Analysis of qualitative interviews reveal that practitioners value the opportunity that post-qualifying awards provide to step back and reflect in-depth on a piece of practice, but that there is neither the time or often the support, to transfer these skills to everyday practice. Reflection emerges as an important tool for learning, but given the complex context of social work practice, it is important that it continues outside of formal education programmes. Barriers and enablers of this process are discussed.
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Numerous social workers discuss the importance of critical reflection and refer to its capacity as an educational tool to improve practice, yet there is relatively little evidence to support the claims made about the benefits of critical reflection by its proponents. This paper contributes to addressing this gap by reporting on the critically reflective educational process undertaken by one practitioner. The transformative learning gained by this practitioner provides a concrete example of how critical reflection improved her thinking about practice by increasing congruence between her espoused theoretical framework and her actual practice, and by creating opportunities for emancipatory practice within a context where she felt constrained to achieve critical practice aims. The paper suggests critical reflection is an important component of social work education.
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Reflective practice has become one of the most popular catch-phrases in the educational milieu during the last few years. In this paper, I chose to focus on the impact of reflective practice on education in general, and early childhood education in particular. Through reflecting on teaching practices, everyday situations that occur in our classrooms and problems and obstacles encountered by teachers and other professionals in the education system, we can seek to improve not only our own personal theory of practice, but also to implement positive changes and growth in the education system as a whole. By seeking to understand how we can improve outcomes for students of all ages, we can broaden the scope of the learning experience of our students, as well as developing the professional competency of our educators.
In this paper, I explore reflective practice literature and the elements of critical reflection, and I reflect on my experiences of learning and using a critical reflection approach to better understand a significant incident. This reflective paper is written from my personal perspective as a social worker using Fook and Gardner's model of critical reflection to provide a framework to reflect, explore and learn from my own experiences. The Fook and Gardner approach to critical reflection encourages deconstruction and analysis of a personal or professional experience to understand the different assumptions, relationships and influences embedded within it and how it affects our practice. As new understandings emerge, the individual is able to reconstruct this incident and develop new techniques to deal with a similar incident in the future.