CPD and Reflection

Your Progress

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You have to think about the subject of occupational compatency which we have already discussed earler. You have a duty to ensure your organisation embrace Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Awarding bodies will expect you to document any activities you participate in to update your competency.

CPD is described as any activities to enhance abilities. which includes knowledge, skills and information. You should not rely on the learning you did ages ago as there could be development in practice. For example first aid and legislation changes over time.

You need to encourage a culture of CPD which can start with simple activities such as watching and learning from shadowing others, attending courses and reading.

Another powerful skill you need to encourage your staff is to self reflect and learn from their experience (both bad and good) and improve their practice. Reflection builds confidence and encourages proactiveness which allows the practiticitor to handle a similar situation better when it reoccurs in their practice.

When reflecting, you can look at the same scenario and consider the perspective of many of your stakeholders such as learners, employers, own organisation and profession. You can draw on theory and models such as Gibbs, John P, Kolb, Brookfields and Rolfe to give you a better understanding of how reflection can be used in practice.

Gibb’s theory involves the following six stages. He referred to this as a cycle as the last stage will feedback into the first stage and start the process again.reflective cycle is a process involving six steps:

  • Description – What happened?
  • Feelings – What did you think and feel about it?
  • Evaluation – What were the positives and negatives?
  • Analysis – What sense can you make of it?
  • Conclusion – What else could you have done?
  • Action Plan – What will you do next time?

.Johns model is based on five questions which enable the practicitor to break down their experience and reflect on the process and outcomes. John (1995) used seminal work by Carper (1978) as the basis for his model exploring aesthetics, personal knowing, ethics and empirics and then encouraging the reflective practitioner to explore how this has changed and improved their practice.

This is a series of questions to help you think through what has happened. You can read the questions here.

This can be used as a guide for analysing a critical incident or for general reflection on experiences. John’s model supports the need for the learner to work with a supervisor throughout the experience.

He also recommends that the student use a structured diary. He suggests the student should ‘look in on the situation’, which would include focusing on yourself and paying attention to your thoughts and emotions. He then advises to ‘look out of the situation’ and write a description of the situation around your thoughts and feelings, what you are trying to achieve, why you responded in the way you did, how others were feeling, did you act in the best way, ethical concepts etc.

Rolfe uses three simple questions to reflect on a situation: What? so what? and now what? He considers the final question as the one that can make the greatest contribution to practice.

  • What …is the problem? …was my role? …happened? …were the consequences?
  • So what …was going through my mind? …should I have done? …do I know about what happened now?
  • Now what …do I need to do? …broader issues have been raised? …might happen now?

Adult education scholar Stephen Brookfield proposed that critically reflective practitioners constantly research their assumptions by seeing practice through four complementary lenses: the lens of their autobiography as learners of reflective practice, the lens of other learners’ eyes, the lens of colleagues’ experiences, and the lens of theoretical, philosophical and research literature.[25] Reviewing practice through these lenses makes us more aware of the power dynamics that infuse all practice settings. It also helps us detect hegemonic assumptions—assumptions that we think are in our own best interests, but actually work against us in the long run.[25] Brookfield argued that these four lenses will reflect back to us starkly different pictures of who we are and what we do.

  • Lens 1: Our autobiography as a learner. Our autobiography is an important source of insight into practice. As we talk to each other about critical events in our practice, we start to realize that individual crises are usually collectively experienced dilemmas. Analysing our autobiographies allows us to draw insight and meanings for practice on a deep visceral emotional level.
  • Lens 2: Our learners’ eyes. Seeing ourselves through learners’ eyes, we may discover that learners are interpreting our actions in the way that we mean them. But often we are surprised by the diversity of meanings people read into our words and actions. A cardinal principle of seeing ourselves through learners’ eyes is that of ensuring the anonymity of their critical opinions. We have to make learners feel safe. Seeing our practice through learners’ eyes helps us teach more responsively.
  • Lens 3: Our colleagues’ experiences. Our colleagues serve as critical mirrors reflecting back to us images of our actions. Talking to colleagues about problems and gaining their perspective increases our chance of finding some information that can help our situation.
  • Lens 4: Theoretical literature. Theory can help us “name” our practice by illuminating the general elements of what we think are idiosyncratic experiences.

Learning theorist David A. Kolb was highly influenced by the earlier research conducted by John Dewey and Jean Piaget. Kolb’s reflective model highlights the concept of experiential learning and is centered on the transformation of information into knowledge. This takes place after a situation has occurred, and entails a practitioner reflecting on the experience, gaining a general understanding of the concepts encountered during the experience, and then testing these general understandings in a new situation. In this way, the knowledge that is formed from a situation is continuously applied and reapplied, building on a practitioner’s prior experiences and knowledge.[15]