Reflecting on your practice helps you to

  • understand what you already know
  • identify what you need to know in practical terms so that you can improve your knowledge (e.g. working with a community group you might need to find out more about constitutions so that you can help them to develop their own, designing a community based adult learning programme with learners, raising awareness with young people of drug misuse)
  • making sense of what happened during a piece of work and learning from the experience
  • identify your areas for further learning

Thinking about your experiences

What important things about my practice have I learned this week!

This should take about five minutes to note down what you’ve learned from your practice this week.
  • Thinking back on what you have done this week when did you feel really involved in what was happening?
  • During the week not really involved in what was happening?
  • Can you think of something someone did this week that you found encouraging and helpful?
  • Can you think of something someone did this week that you found confusing?
  • What about your practice this week surprised you most (e.g. your reaction to something that happened, something someone did, something that you thought worked really well/ was much more difficult than you anticipated?)

Seeing situations from different perspectives

Making sure that you can learn from your experience is an important part of being a reflective worker. This means thinking about your own experience in a structured way is important to making sure your practice is effective. It’s also important for identifying ways in which you can improve.

Key questions you can discuss with others
  • What you felt worked well
  • What you felt could have been done differently
  • What other things were happening during the activity and how these might have affected things
  • Something that surprised you
  • Something that confused you
Last modified: Monday, 31 August 2015, 1:32 PM