Reflective Practice

1. Reflective Practice: Navigating Uncertainty with Insight

Reflective practice is a state of mind, an ongoing attitude to life and work, the pearl grit in the oyster of practice and education; danger lies in it being a separate curriculum element with a set of exercises.

Embracing uncertainty. Professionals often operate in "swampy lowlands" where clear paths and definitive answers are rare. Reflective practice provides the essential tools—like a compass and map—to navigate these complex, unpredictable situations. It transforms muddles, uncertainties, and mistakes into valuable learning opportunities, moving beyond merely repeating one year of experience twenty times.

Making sense of experience. This practice helps individuals understand themselves, their work, and their relationship to wider society and culture. It uncovers what we know, what we don't know we know, and what we need to explore further. By engaging in critical reflection, practitioners can identify specific areas for improvement and develop a deeper understanding of their professional identity and boundaries.

Empowering change. Reflective practice offers strategies to bring hidden issues into the open, frame searching questions, and challenge assumptions. It fosters acceptance of complexity and uncertainty, leading to increased job satisfaction and reduced stress. This process empowers individuals to make changes in their practice and, potentially, within their institutions, fostering greater unity and empathy.

2. Reflection and Reflexivity: Beyond Surface-Level Thought

Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, theories-in-use, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions; to understand our complex roles in relation to others.

Distinguishing core concepts. Reflection involves an in-depth review of events—what happened, who was involved, and what was thought or felt. It seeks to understand the situation from multiple angles, including people, place, timing, and context. This process helps bring experiences into focus and connect them with relevant theories and texts.

Deepening self-awareness. Reflexivity takes reflection a step further by critically examining one's own perspective, values, and assumptions. It challenges deeply held beliefs and habitual actions, revealing how personal and cultural factors shape our understanding and behavior. This critical self-questioning is essential for developing responsible and ethical actions, such as recognizing how our actions might marginalize others.

Unsettling but transformative. Engaging in reflexivity can feel uncomfortable, like "laying down charges of psychological dynamite," as it confronts ingrained "truths." It requires bravery to stay with uncertainty, openness to others' perceptions, and flexibility to change. This deep questioning leads to significant personal and professional development, enabling practitioners to act with greater integrity and challenge inconsistencies in their environment.

3. Values and Principles: The Ethical Compass of Practice

Professional integrity can be defined as having values-in-practice as close to the same as espoused values as possible.

Aligning values and actions. Reflective practice is fundamentally a moral and principled process, rooted in ethical values. It helps bridge the gap between "espoused values" (what we claim to believe) and "values-in-practice" (what we actually do). This alignment, or congruence, is crucial for professional integrity and continuous development.

Paradoxical principles. Critical reflective practice is guided by paradoxical principles that embrace uncertainty and playfulness.

• Certain uncertainty: Acknowledging that uncertainty is the only constant, fostering an open-minded, enquiring attitude.
• Serious playfulness: Encouraging experimentation and adventure within a safe environment to uncover new possibilities.
• Unquestioning questioning: Accepting the spirit of questioning everything, including one's own self-importance, to discover deeper truths.
  These paradoxes cultivate a dynamic approach to learning and growth.

Cultivating essential qualities. The process fosters self-respect, responsibility, generosity, and empathy. It encourages mindfulness—a complete, non-judgmental focus on the present—which helps in making conscious choices rather than being driven by habit. Reflective practice can also lead to forgiveness, releasing individuals from negative memories and fostering a more constructive engagement with their past and present.

4. Narrative: The Human Way of Making Sense

We do not ‘store’ experience as data, like a computer: we ‘story’ it.

Stories as fundamental. Humans inherently make sense of events and relationships through narratives. Life-as-lived is chaotic, but when recounted, experiences are structured into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, giving them meaning and making them memorable. These narratives are not mere reports; they are constructs that reveal underlying values, principles, and "theories-in-use."

Autobiographical exploration. Reflective practice often begins with autobiographical stories of specific incidents, which act as "slices" revealing broader patterns of practice. By narrating these events, individuals can externalize their experiences, allowing for critical examination of their actions, beliefs, emotions, and professional identity. This process helps in understanding how personal history shapes present behavior, as seen in the example of Dr. Mark Purvis reflecting on his brother's death.

Re-storying for growth. Our identities are not fixed; they are "ongoing narrative projects" that change and develop over time. Reflective narratives allow us to perceive ourselves as dynamically evolving, challenging the notion of a single, stable self. By re-storying experiences, we can gain new perspectives, make sense of complexity, and transform our understanding, leading to personal and professional growth.

5. Perspective: Seeing Beyond Your Own Viewpoint

Central to the reflective process is this attempt to see things from a variety of viewpoints.

Multiple lenses for insight. Critical reflective practice involves actively creating and re-creating narratives from different perspectives. This moves beyond a narrow personal viewpoint to perceive fresh possibilities and challenge assumptions. For example, writing an incident from a client's perspective, even if fictional, can profoundly enhance empathy and understanding, as demonstrated by Sam the midwife.

The role of the narrator. Every story is presented from a narrator's point of view, and understanding this is crucial. The "I" of writing is a character, distinct from the "I" of life, allowing for a safer exploration of sensitive issues. Experimenting with different narrators—such as a child, an omniscient observer, or even an inanimate object—can provide invaluable distance and insight into one's own actions and the dynamics of a situation.

Fiction for truth. While narratives cannot claim objective truth, fictional accounts can offer "metaphorical truth" and "ecstatic flashes" of illumination. Writing fictionally removes the pressure of strict adherence to facts, allowing deeper engagement with imagination and intuitive knowledge. This approach helps bypass issues of confidentiality and embarrassment, enabling a more direct exploration of complex ethical dilemmas and emotional landscapes.

6. Metaphor: Shaping Thought and Action

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature… human thought processes are largely metaphorical.

Ubiquitous and powerful. Metaphor is not merely a literary device but a fundamental way humans think, understand, and communicate. We use an astonishing six metaphors a minute, often unconsciously, to make sense of abstractions and complex ideas. These metaphors shape our perceptions, values, ethical beliefs, and ultimately, our actions.

Unwitting vs. conscious use. Unwittingly used metaphors can restrict perception and reinforce limiting beliefs, such as viewing the body as a machine or the economy as a marketplace. Conscious awareness and experimentation with fresh metaphors, however, can irrevocably alter our understanding of culture, society, and work. This reflexive process empowers individuals to challenge ingrained views and take responsibility for the moral and social consequences of their language.

Illuminating the abstract. Metaphors make the abstract concrete, grasping the ungraspable and making the invisible visible. They allow for "cognitive, affective and somatic ways of knowing," engaging all five senses. By playing with metaphors, individuals can access deeper levels of understanding, connect with traumatic memories in a non-threatening way, and articulate new insights that might otherwise remain hidden.

7. Writing: The Act of Discovery and Transformation

We… write to become what and who we are.

Writing as the process. Reflective writing is not merely a record of thought; it is the reflective and reflexive process itself. It's a method of inquiry, a way of finding out about oneself and one's practice. By putting words on paper, individuals can capture, structure, and illuminate events, thoughts, feelings, and values, leading to self-illumination and exploration.

Unlocking inner wisdom. Writing allows access to parts of ourselves we don't often listen to, bypassing assumptions and social rules. It enables a dialogue with the self, where the hand writes without conscious direction, often revealing "diamonds in the dustheap" of seemingly random thoughts. This process can be deeply cathartic, helping to lighten burdens and provide unexpected insights.

Discipline and voice. While writing requires discipline, it also offers immense freedom of exploration. Overcoming "writer's block" and internal critics involves trusting the process, writing without censorship, and allowing one's unique "writer's voice" to emerge. This artistic scrutiny of practice, through narratives, metaphors, and other creative forms, harnesses memories and provides greater access to the experiences of others, fostering empathy and transformative learning.

8. The Reflective Journal: A Private Space for Growth

Unless [my students] feel sufficiently free to write things in their journals that they would be embarrassed for me to read, then they are probably not using their journals sufficiently well for them to be good examples of reflection.

A dedicated space for inquiry. Reflective practice journals serve as experimental stations for regular, private, explorative, and expressive writing. Unlike logs (factual records) or diaries (personal confidantes), journals are specifically designed for in-depth self-dialogue, capturing experiences, thoughts, and feelings related to professional life. They are primarily for the writer's own reflexivity and development.

Ethical and personal growth. Journal writing fosters awareness of ethical values in practice, helping to align them with espoused beliefs. It provides a safe, private space to examine uncomfortable assumptions, prejudices, and vulnerable areas, allowing for genuine self-enquiry. This process, akin to a "play" or "transitional space," enables writers to experiment with ideas, values, and possible selves without fear of judgment.

Structured exploration. While journals offer freedom, they can also benefit from structured approaches. The "four stages of journal writing" guide practitioners through:

1. Six-minute write: Clearing the mind and initiating flow.
2. Incident narrative: Detailing a specific experience.
3. Read and respond: Reflecting on the writing, asking "why" questions, and noting insights.
4. Developing writing: Expanding on themes, exploring different perspectives, or using creative forms.
   This iterative process deepens understanding and facilitates ongoing self-discovery.

9. Assessment and Evaluation: Fostering Learning, Not Just Grading

What I wanted, in contrast to faux evaluations, was something that could sink its hooks into my classes, something with wings and talons that could sweep down and snatch both me and my students by the shoulders and shake us out of our collective passivity to the point that we either shrieked with pain at the terror of plummeting to our deaths or else clung to it for survival until we could glide back down to some more stable literary terra firma.

The assessment conundrum. Assessing reflective practice is inherently complex because it is a process-based, deeply personal activity, while assessment is typically product-based. The awareness of being graded can corrupt genuine reflection, leading students to produce "laundered" or "strategic journal entries" that conform to expected criteria rather than honest self-enquiry. This poses a significant challenge to maintaining the integrity of reflective learning.

Problems with traditional grading. Many experts argue that graded assessment is inappropriate for reflective writing, as it can stifle spontaneity, individuality, and the exploration of vulnerable emotions. It risks reducing reflection to a "tick-box" exercise, devaluing its transformative potential. The subjective nature of reflective content also makes standardized grading difficult, often forcing uncomfortable value judgments from assessors.

Solutions for authentic learning. To mitigate these issues, various strategies are proposed:

• Self- and peer-assessment: Empowering students to develop their own criteria and provide feedback, fostering critical self-awareness.
• Formative feedback: Ongoing dialogue between tutors and students to guide learning without formal grading.
• Patchwork text assessment: Submitting a synthesis of fragments created over time, allowing assessment of the learning process.
• Critical Incident Questionnaires (CIQs): Regular, anonymous evaluations that encourage critical reflection on course dynamics and inform improvements.
  The goal is to prioritize learning and development, ensuring assessment methods align with the ethical and pedagogical principles of reflective practice.

10. Team Development: Building Connection Through Shared Reflection

We get to know each other through the writings in a way we are never normally privileged to do.

Collaborative learning. Shared reflective writing is a powerful tool for team development, fostering deep communication, understanding, and strength among colleagues. It creates a "refractive practice" where individual perspectives are illuminated and reconfigured within the collective medium of the team. This process encourages frankness and openness, allowing teams to address underlying issues and reconfigure relationships.

Creating safe spaces. Establishing a safe-enough environment with clear boundaries is crucial for effective team reflection. Ground rules, such as focusing on the writing rather than the writer and ensuring confidentiality, enable participants to share sensitive material. This shared vulnerability builds trust and mutual respect, transforming isolated professionals into a cohesive, supportive group.

Beyond individual growth. Team-based reflective writing not only develops individual practitioners but also enhances collective efficacy. It helps teams:

• Identify common themes and shared challenges.
• Gain insight into institutional and structural strains.
• Develop new strategies for communication and conflict resolution.
• Increase confidence and engagement in new initiatives.
  By engaging in this process, teams can move beyond superficial interactions to a deeper understanding of each other's experiences, leading to more humane care, better decision-making, and increased staff well-being.

Last updated: January 17, 2026