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Developing reflective
5
practice
Introduction
Throughout this book, you have been encouraged to think
about your own practice and about the effects it has on your
candidates and their experience. Working in a professional
manner demands a continuous process of reflection, which
involves looking at your practices, ideas and actions, then
evaluating their effectiveness in order to make improvements.
Reflecting on practice
Reflective practice
Reflecting on your day-to-day practice enables you to analyse
The process of thinking
why and how you do things, and to consider whether other
about and critically
approaches might benefit you and your candidates. Reflective
analysing your actions
practice is used as a model for developing your skills and
with the goal of
making sense of the work you do as an assessor. For example,
changing and improving
you might reflect on a specific underpinning knowledge session
occupational practice.
and consider how you could have taught the information
differently to enable better learning for the candidates.
Effective reflection requires you to be open-minded and to
examine, question and assess your own practice, so as to
develop your skills and knowledge. To develop your skills as
a reflective professional, you should:
• listen openly to the ideas of others
• reflect on your own work and on the work of those
around you
• consider and implement ways to develop your practice.
Experiences Outcome
Reflection
Ideas Better practice
Re-evaluation
Understanding Application
Over to you!
Reflective practice
Consider how you have used reflective practice previously and how the reflection changed
your outcomes. Think about how your practice improved and any impact this had on others
around you.
The best person to help you to work effectively within your role
is yourself. Being a reflective practitioner means being aware
of your limitations and the gaps in your knowledge, as well as
your strengths and qualities.
Addressing candidates’ needs By thinking about the way you have responded to your
candidates’ individual needs, you can develop new
strategies.
Working with colleagues Reflecting on the way you interact with colleagues can
help you to create better relationships. This can help
you to enjoy your work more.
Your role with your candidates By thinking about the effectiveness of the way you work
with candidates, you can tailor your approach to suit their
needs and interests.
Planning candidates’ learning By considering the effectiveness of your plans, you can
help to develop new systems of planning and recording
that are faster and more effective.
Working with external agencies By thinking through how you work with external agencies,
you may be able to develop stronger partnerships.
Benchmarks
Best practice
Good practice requires time to evolve and develop and it is
benchmarks
therefore important to evaluate your performance against
Standards that are widely
best practice benchmarks. This is why it is essential that
agreed as providing the
you continuously update your professional competence and
most advanced,
undertake training to ensure that you are aware of changes in
up-to-date thinking and
legislation and standards.
practice against which
you can measure what you
Developing reflective skills are doing (not minimum
standards). They may
In order to fully develop your skills as a reflective practitioner,
be statutory/regulatory
you need to question what you do and why you do it, rather
or based on other
than just doing what you have been told to do. You may find it
requirements or research.
helpful to consider the different elements of your job role and
to look at them individually.
There may be times when you feel you are making good
progress and working efficiently. At these times, you should
ensure you think about what it is that is working well. What
skills or knowledge have assisted your work? Are there any
particular practices within your setting which have helped you
to work successfully? Considering these things will allow you
to reflect on the progress you are making and what it is that
is helping you to progress. You may also have days where
you feel nothing is going right. Again, you should consider
why this is. Is it a lack of knowledge, lack of resources or poor
understanding that has made things difficult for you? Are there
certain practices within the setting that are difficult to conform
with and, if so, could you come up with alternative methods of
working?
Think about consequences Think about Question the way that you do things
how changing practice might affect other Are some things done in a certain way
aspects of your work (e.g changing Reflective simply because that is how they have
routines may affect parents, children analysis always been done?
and colleagues)
Think about . . .
1 Why is it important to regularly review your work?
2 How might the sector and the wider college benefit from reviewing this area of work?
3 How might individual staff benefit from focusing on this area of work?
4 What might be the benefits to the candidates?
Over to you!
The reflection process
Look into how your centre has changed over the last five years and consider the reflection
processes that might have been carried out in order to make these changes.
Over to you!
Are you a reflective practitioner?
As you have seen, it is important to reflect on your own practice. Take a look at the
statements below to assess whether or not you are a reflective practitioner. You might like to
use this task with your candidates, as the statements all refer to the Performance Criteria for
CCLD Level 3, Unit 304.1.