What is reflective practice?
"In general, reflective practice is understood as the process of learning through and from experience towards gaining new insights of self and/or practice. This often involves examining assumptions of everyday practice."
Linda Finlay - Reflecting on 'Reflective practice' (2008)
Reflection is critical to being a conscious, effective practitioner in any discipline. The important thing to keep in mind is that reflecting by itself is not reflective practice. Practice is tied into active, impactful change that emerges from deep reflective learning.
Thinking and doing
Reflective practice is the act of thinking about your experiences in order to learn from them to shape what you do in the future. It therefore includes all aspects of your practice (e.g. relationships, interactions, learning, assessments, behaviours, and environments). It also includes examining how your practice is influenced by your own world views and gaining insights and other perspectives to inform future decision making.
Why reflect?
Reflective practice benefits you on both professional and personal levels. Using critical reflection as a tool can give you insight and positively impact your study, your wellbeing and your worklife. Click the plus icons (+) to view some benefits of reflective practice.
Activity overview
This interactive hotspot activity outlines 6 benefits of reflective practice. The hotspots are displayed as plus (+) icons that can be clicked to reveal the benefits, as follows
Benefit 1: Creativity
Reflective practice sparks creativity. By engaging in critical reflection to change practice you are making time and space for innovation. It enables new ways of thinking, feeling and doing.
Benefit 2: Develops your skills and knowledges
Engaging with critical reflection processes as part of reflective practice is a key learning tool. Continual development of skills and knowledges is part of student, work and personal life. Reflective practice helps you identify areas to improve on or strengthen.
Benefit 3: Emotional intelligence
Reflection is at the heart of understanding our emotions and their impact on our behaviours. It also underpins our ability to contextualise the behaviours of others. Reflective practice builds your emotional intelligence which is a critical skill for working with others and for our own wellbeing.
Benefit 4: Self-awareness
Reflective practice fosters new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. As part of that it helps you step back and reflect on assumptions and biases. Challenging set ways of thinking about people, situations or information can stimulate you to open up your perspective.
Benefit 5: Wellbeing
Reflective practice uses critical reflection tools and strategies that support wellbeing. Having defined and familiar processes for thinking through experiences and practices helps maintain perspective. It also helps you move forward into change or action rather than remaining negatively focused an experience. Critical reflection gives you a way to learn and to move forward.
Benefit 6: Problem solving
Reflective practice considers all aspects of experiences, it looks to evidence base, it questions your assumptions and biases, it examines perspectives, and it prompts changes in thinking, feeling and doing. It builds valuable insights to inform decision making and develop deeper understanding. This is what makes it such an amazing vehicle for problem solving.
When to critically reflect?
Critical reflection connects to past, current and future action. Click on each of the flip cards to learn the time-related actions you need to do as part of reflective practice.
Reflective practice and critical reflection
Reflective practice is part of your mindset and everyday doing for both uni and the workplace. The process also relies on using critical reflection as a tool to analyse your reflections and which allows you to evaluate, inform and continually change your practice.
Explore the infographic below for a visual depiction of the reflective practice and critical reflection relationship.
Critical reflection and areas of your practice
Reflective practice relies on your ability to be open to change and to consider relevant evidence that can challenge or inform decision making. Critical reflection is what allows you to deeply understand your study or work practice and then to take actions to improve it.
You should critically reflect on all aspects of your practice including:
Reflective practice and you
How would you define reflective practice for yourself? There's no right or wrong answer to this question because it's so contextual. The way you enact reflective practice is tied to you and how you think, feel and do. We know that writing down or verbalising your thinking can help you better understand what something means to you. With that in mind...
Your Task
Take a few moments to think about how you define reflective practice. You can then record yourself using the interactive audio activity below and download the soundbyte. Any recording you make is only available to you. Keep this definition in mind as you move through this critical reflection guide.