Supervising the Reflective Practitioner

An Essential Guide to Theory and Practice

Joyce Scaife

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317834137
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Development as a reflective practitioner has become an essential quality for practitioners in the fields of health, education and social care. Supervising the Reflective Practitioner provides guidance for supervisors, focusing on what they can do to facilitate the development of reflective practice in supervisees.

This book contains a wide range of practical examples including personal accounts and illustrations. Topics covered include:

• what is reflective practice and why is it important now?
• how reflective practice connects with personal and professional development
• key issues in supervising reflective practice
• methods that can be used in supervision.

This accessible book will be of great interest to both supervisors and supervisees who practice clinically in a range of professions, including applied psychology, counselling, psychotherapy, psychiatry and nursing. It will also be useful for professionals working in education, health, and social care who want to support supervisees in the development of reflective practice.

Chapter 1

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Introduction and context

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Reflective practice; I hate it.
I don't know what it is.
I passed it last year though.

(Radiography student)

Why do some people?

When I was thinking about writing this book, I was asked to consider, ‘Why do some people find reflective practice more difficult than others? Is it about their learning style or personal philosophy?’ I have not sought or found a definitive answer. But just as with any other skill such as dancing, cooking, listening, carpentry, bagpipe playing, swimming or golf, a limited level of current attainment tells us nothing about the impact that learning may have on future accomplishment. What I hope to do in this book is to make the idea of reflective practice accessible, and provide material with which supervisors can help supervisees to find out about and develop their skills in reflective practice.

The demonstration of reflective practice has become a pre-registration requirement across a wide and diverse range of professions during the period since the publication of Donald Schön's seminal 1983 and 1987 texts The reflective practitioner and Educating the reflective practitioner. My search of article titles for the term ‘reflective practice’ on the electronic database PsycINFO produced one reference in total for the years 1960–1989 and 145 for the years 1990–2008. The growth of interest is also reflected in the emergence in 2000 of a journal entitled Reflective Practice devoted entirely to this topic across professional groups. This book is similarly addressed to a wide professional audience, drawing on diverse illustrative examples from practice settings in health, education and social care. Later in this chapter I explore the factors that may account for the surge in interest in reflective practice at the present time.

In this introduction I want to clarify and simplify the concept of reflective practice by reviewing various definitions and approaches and exploring the relationships between reflective practice (Dewey 1933), reflexivity (Burnham 1993; Von Foerster 1981, 1991), critical thinking (Brookfield 1987, 2005; Paul 1993), experiential learning (Kolb 1984) and transformative learning (Mezirow and associates 1990).

What is reflective practice?

From among the many definitions of reflection and reflective practice that I have met in the literature, I have tried to distil a personal view with the aim of clarifying for myself and for you how I am using the term ‘reflective practice’ in this book. I see it as an instance of thoughtful practice. For many purposes, neither thoughtful practice nor reflective practice are necessary and may even be positively dangerous. Take the example of crossing the road. If you reflect too deeply on something while crossing the road, you increase your chances of being run over. Safely crossing the road relies on the development of a routine (look right, look left, look right again …) that has been learned in childhood and is produced automatically. While learning this routine you probably recited to yourself the words that you had been taught to guide your action. This self-talk usually disappears once the behaviour has become a habit.

But when visiting a place which involves driving on the opposite side of the road from your home country, the routine does not work and it is necessary to give more conscious thought than usual to the action. Let's imagine that you look right, and seeing nothing coming, take a step into the road before looking left, whereupon you experience a near miss when a car swerves to avoid you. You decide to be more cautious when next crossing the road and make sure that you look in each direction several times before stepping out. I would call this thoughtful practice. If, however, you not only think about but also analyse the incident, you might say to yourself that because the traffic drives on the other side of the road it is necessary to reverse the sequence of your normal looking before crossing the road. You have created a hypothesis or possible explanation for the experience. You might even decide to train yourself to recite the reverse sequence when next faced with crossing the road. You have undergone a conversation with yourself about the incident in which you have considered your normal behaviour, thought about why it did not work on this occasion and decided to make a conscious change in what you will do on the next occasion. This becomes reflective practice when the critical reflection shapes future action. This may be changed action but could equally well result in unchanged practice if the conclusion of the reflection is that all is well. From this perspective, reflective practice does not have to be associated with a need for change. In the case of crossing the road the reflection has involved creating an explanation of the experience, reviewing your usual practice, thinking of possible ways to approach the matter in the future and making a decision about your own future action.

It would have been possible to reflect on the incident without engaging in reflective practice. For example you could have said to yourself: ‘That was a near miss.’ ‘I could have been knocked over.’ ‘I might have been badly hurt.’ ‘Stupid driver.’ If the reflection goes no further it would not count as reflective practice because it has closed down at the level of description; it has no implications for your future action.

The term reflective practice carries the implication that the consequences of reflecting will impact upon and possibly bear fruit in one's own practice but whether this is the case will be determined not only by the process and outcomes of reflection but also by the potentially competing demands of well-established habits and feelings. Many people reflect on their smoking behaviour and conclude that they should change their practice but for various reasons fail to carry this through.

Reflective practice involves thinking from a bird's-eye view about an event and/or aspects of my practice. The perspective includes myself, encompassing my behaviour, thoughts and/or feelings in relation to my practice, with the implication that the reflection will impact on, although not necessarily alter, my practice. Gillie Bolton (2005) refers to this orientation as ‘the hawk in your mind’. Such a distanced perspective may also include an analysis of social, ethical and cultural issues. This dimension arises particularly in health, social care and education settings because the worker is discharging a moral responsibility to care about the feelings of the student, client or patient. The practical actions of these professionals have wider and potentially more enduring consequences than is likely to be the case in occupations that deal with inanimate material although contemplation of value positions is still relevant.

Reflective practice can involve becoming aware of how underlying taken-for-granted cultural or personal assumptions influence our judgements. Developing awareness can lead to experimentation with other ways of seeing which might lead to more desirable courses of action. In the crossing the road example, it would be possible to question the organisation of transport into systems which allow pedestrians and traffic to intermingle with the risk of fatality. Broader reflection might question the need or desirability for citizens to engage in rapid movements between destinations in individual motorised vehicles run on fossil fuels.

To take this reflection even further, or deeper, it is possible to see concealed in this example the underlying issue of time as a commodity. Reductions in the time taken to get from A to B have featured in adverts for public transport in the UK. In the traditional society of Ladakh a rapid lifestyle change occurred after the introduction of new tools, crops and livestock (Norberg-Hodge 1991). Yak were replaced by cows, which provide about ten times the amount of milk, thereby creating a surplus which could be turned into cheese and sold. This newly created wealth gave the Ladhakis a different view of time, as something in short supply. Ladhakis have become busy creating wealth and saving time. Leisure time has been reduced by the introduction of time-saving technology. Their wedding celebrations now last just half a day instead of a fortnight. Guy Claxton (1998) suggests that within the Western mindset time is a commodity with an accompanying imperative to think faster, to solve problems and make decisions as rapidly as possible.

If we were to reflect so widely or deeply on all of our professional actions I imagine that we wouldn't get much done. Not only is reflective practice impractical and potentially dangerous in situations where judgements need to be made in an instant and on the basis of well-established routines, but also it is unsuited to learning that takes place through ‘osmosis’ unconsciously in what Claxton (1998) calls ‘the undermind’. He cites much evidence to suggest that some everyday predicaments are better and more effectively approached with a slow ‘tortoise’ mind which cannot be rushed. The nonconscious mind extracts patterns from rich perceptual data, a process which can be hindered by attempts to express this in language before the learner has had time to build up a solid body of first-hand experience. Later, attempting to bring this to consciousness with the purpose of thinking critically about it may be helpful to learning and this is where reflective practice comes in. Claxton, referring to some experiments with children carried out by Annette Karmiloff-Smith, states:

It is as if, when faced with a challenge, children use whatever is at hand to respond to it, like someone after a shipwreck constructing an emergency raft out of all kinds of flotsam in order to keep them afloat. But later, when they have a little more leisure, after the storm has passed, they move into a more reflective mode in which they experiment with taking this lash-up to bits again to see what happens, and where it might fruitfully draw on pre-existing pockets of know-how developed to cope with different situations, to make their know-how as a whole more elegant, integrated and powerful.

(Claxton 1998: 45)

Reflection that involves analysis and/or synthesis is sometimes called critical reflection in the literature. The term implies that the reflection involves making discriminations, evaluating, judging, assessing, and weighing up options. This is the kind of reflection that I think is involved in reflective practice and which can result in more elegant, integrated and useful know-how.

Reflective practice is the process of thinking analytically about what we are doing, thinking and/or feeling, both as we are doing it and later in review from an observer perspective that allows us to include ourselves and the wider value-laden context in the frame, and which may lead to changes in or consolidation of our practice. It is a process which can be engaged without the need for the stimulation of particular incidents, but rather involves an attitude of open-minded curiosity oriented towards ongoing learning based on any of our experiences that are capable of informing professional practice:

very often we find that we have reached some kind of a conclusion in our thinking without having recorded or noted any actual instances: they have occurred, but the separate incidents have disappeared into a general sense of knowing … we often find that we are acting from a value position which is not actually based upon the facts. We then need to examine our practice for data that will confirm, modify or challenge our existing value position.

(Tripp 1993: 39)

Schön referred to these processes as ‘reflection-in-action’ and ‘reflection-on-action’. The additional concept of ‘anticipatory reflection’ is discussed by Conway (2001) and Van Manen (1990), highlighting the circularity of the reflective process when it informs subsequent practice. Meaning-making follows an original experience but when reflecting-in-action the timescales are very short. Reflection-on-action can take place minutes, hours, weeks, months or years after the original interaction. I think that there is great skill in being able simultaneously to participate in a process and take an observer perspective, particularly when it involves interpersonal processes. This is the case in many of the professions that aspire to produce reflective practitioners.

I find reflection-in-action to be particularly challenging when strong emotions are involved and when interactions are taking place in intimate relationships. Take the example of my having a disagreement with my spouse. We have a history of managing our disagreements and long-standing habits that direct the process. If I feel unheard or misunderstood, I might raise my voice and/or use an accusatory tone. I might go silent. I might (although this is less likely) adopt a position of curiosity about my spouse's position in relation to the issue. My prior mood is likely to influence my reactions. If I can manage my feelings and mentally step back, I might be able to rein in my habitual repertoire of responses and think about alternatives that may lead to more constructive outcomes. In my relationship with my spouse I might prefer to allow myself free rein.

In professional contexts my role is different. The well-being of others is the focus and purpose of my work. I need to keep this in mind at all times. My personal reactions are important and useful. I need to engage with the issues with energy and resourcefulness. In this context my feelings and thoughts are information and my task is to monitor these and generate ideas from among which I choose in deciding what next to do and say. I might jot down some of my ideas and return to these later if the direction of the work does not seem optimally useful. Successful analytical reflection on practice should lead to learning and skill development because it involves maintaining a stance of curiosity and questioning automatic responses. Instead of doing things in the way that they have habitually been done or according to a manual or technical prescription, the worker feels, thinks and modifies what he or she is doing responsively to the ongoing process. No wonder Schön referred to this as professional artistry. The creative element is forefront.

This is not to deny the importance of theory and technique in skilful practice. It is from a consolidated theoretical and practical base that workers develop the capacity to adapt and improvise according to the demands of the situation. Here is an account by a clinical nurse specialist for nutrition who modified her approach to a patient through reflection-in-action. She was consciously attempting to develop her skills in reflective practice and used the Burford model (Johns 2000) to guide her actions:

The reflective cues — ‘How is this person feeling?’ and ‘How do I feel about this person?’ — keep popping into my head. I had a situation with a patient, Kim, it changed the whole way the experience went. She is 26 with Crohn's disease. She has a nasty fistula pouring fluid. She is on total parenteral nutrition (TPN). I visited her on the ward. Her dressing had been done. The ‘Hickman line’ should have been fixed in … she had sat on it and it pulled out. The doctor said he would sort another out but she had said, ‘no!’ I went in. I knew she would not get better without a new line. My intention was to be forc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and context
• 2 Frameworks supporting reflective practice
• 3 Reflective practice and personal and professional development
• 4 Supervision conditions that support reflective practice
• 5 Approaches to supervision of reflective practice (I): enquiry
• 6 Approaches to supervision of reflective practice (II): methods that encourage self-awareness
• 7 Approaches to supervision of reflective practice (III): methods that encourage ‘decentring’ and multiple perspectives
• 8 Approaches to supervision of reflective practice (IV): ‘live’ methods, recordings and groups
• 9 Reflective writing
• 10 Assessment of reflective practice and the supervisor's role in coursework assignments
• Appendix 1 Carper's model of reflective practice
• Appendix 2 Bransford and Johnson illustration
• References
• Author index
• Subject index