Reflective Practice and Learning From Mistakes in Social Work

Sicora, Alessandro, Alessandro Sicora

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781447325222
• eBook ISBN: 9781447325239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

What is a mistake in social work and how can we turn it into a positive learning experience? Simply going over the events of the day is often not enough and can become overwhelming.

Learning from professional errors is, however, vital for successful reflective practice. This important book presents a theoretical framework that underpins this learning, along with a series of strategies for social workers to use either by themselves or as part of a group. These include creating questions and narratives to enhance learning, assertive techniques for receiving and offering criticism and organisational learning from mistakes.

With plenty of practice examples and questions for reflection, this is essential reading for both social work students, and practitioners and managers at all stages of their career.

FOUR

Questions and narratives: basic tools for enhancing learning from professional mistakes

Learning outcomes

After this chapter you will be able to:

1 ask ‘smart questions’;

2 find a ‘critical friend’ who can offer external perspectives to extend personal reflective capacity;

3 have an overview on reflective frameworks, start using some of them and ‘handcraft’ new, more effective and tailor-made tools;

4 choose the most appropriate of the many different strategies for reflective writing according to goal and context;

5 use concise reflective writing as an essential, effective and practicable strategy even when working conditions make it hard to find time for structured reflection;

6 appreciate and start using different forms of metaphors, visual or written, in order to gain a holistic and deeper understanding of significant events so as to better nurture reflective practice.

Introduction

The last two chapters of this book are focused on tools and strategies that are available in order to improve the quality of reflection and reflective practice. This chapter presents some techniques and strategies helpful at an individual level (or in a dyadic situation) and the final chapter presents tools to be used in cooperation with other people or the entire organisation where the social workers are employed.

The quantity of tools and strategies available in literature is really huge. The ones presented here have been selected with a special focus on mistakes and failures in social work and according to their capacity to improve professional practice.

The role of questions is vital in any process of reflection. When people reflect they are doing nothing but asking questions of themselves. Choosing the appropriate questions is of great importance to orientate the eyes of the mind in the most fruitful direction and consequently bring the person’s attention to some selected and crucial aspects of the event under scrutiny.

As the Nobel Prize winner for literature Naguib Mahfouz is reported to have said, ‘you can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions’ (Gelb, 1996, p 96). So, since the ‘right’ questions are so important for learning from experience as well, and it is not easy to formulate them, there are a lot of frameworks developed with the purpose of making reflective practitioners ‘wiser’, that is to say, to enhance and deepen their reflection. They are formed by lists of questions whose purpose is to lead people to reflect on and explore the experience in detail and in areas where usually they are not looking for the solutions to their problems.

In this chapter, Gibbs’ (1988) reflective cycle is described, as well as its main stages: (1) description, (2) feelings, (3) evaluation, (4) analysis, (5) conclusion, (6) action plan – and the many questions (more than 30) aimed to submit an event to a sort of ‘x-ray’ in order to grasp its full meaning and implications for future action. Other reflective frameworks constructed for the same purpose are also presented. With or without the use of questions, telling stories of professional errors is an indispensable tool for reflecting on these kinds of events and to understand their meaning. The role of narrative is significant both as a form of interior dialogue and as a story told by someone face to face. Each of these modes allows us to explore the past, to explain the present and direct action towards the future. Any area of personal or professional life may be subject to such a mode of investigation.

Reflective writing, which is when someone writes with the purpose of reflecting, is described and its opportunities, limits and forms (divided into two main categories: analytical and creative) are highlighted. Analytical strategies include, for example, journal writing, dialogical writing, critical incident analyses (dialogue with questions and answers using the reflective frameworks mentioned earlier), ‘making a case’ (with the goal of exploring alternative ways of looking at the event examined), SWOT analysis (focused on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and others. Creative strategies also involve the emotional side of experiences and embrace writing a letter that will not be sent, writing to another person or as the other, writing as a journalist, writing a story, a fairy tale or a poem inspired by the event, drawing mind maps and others. Some strategies and suggestions for reflective writing when there is not so much time (a very common condition among social workers) are also offered in this chapter, where a specific section is dedicated to the reflective journal in consideration of its importance.

Finally, more creative and ‘artistic’ techniques (like audio and video recording, pictures and others) are briefly described. In fact, many forms of creativity and even arts may enhance the quality of reflection and reflective practice.

The art of asking questions

The essence of any process of reflection is made of internal dialogues that are constantly animated and nourished by questions. They are often even more important than answers because the former are useful in a wider variety of circumstances but the latter are much more situational. Even if it sounds like a paradox, it is true that there are a lot of good answers around, but good questions appear rarely and consequently are more precious.

It seems that Oscar Wilde said: ‘Everyone can give an answer; it takes a genius to raise real questions’ (Ravasi, 1996). The famous writer stressed the cognitive value inherent in ‘smart’ questions since they allow the selection of those particular aspects that make it possible to build the ultimate sense of what happened and guide this process within the informational complexity and density of the experience.

What is a ‘smart’ question? Who asks and answers it? What is it about? And how are good questions formulated? This first section tries to reply to these inquiries.

First, a smart question is something that puzzles, one to which it is not known immediately what to say but that leads to searching and thinking, maybe after exclaiming: “This is really a good question!” But a good question really goes to the bottom of the issue and does not abandon the thinker in a desert because in its formulation there are some hidden suggestions helping and guiding the search. According to Solomon Ibn Gabirol as cited by Johnson (2003, p 158) ‘a wise man’s question contains half the answer’. A similar message is included in the quotation by Fincher and Petre (2004, p 21) from Isaac and Michael (1982, p 219), when they say that ‘a question well stated is a question half answered’.

A good question may be described using two images. It is like a ship sailing seas and exploring distant lands where its sailors have never been before and may find treasures and magic items, that is, as in some myths and fairy tales, something that may be able to successfully resolve difficult situations. But smart questions also metaphorically bring light into the darkness and help to explore unknown areas that previously were in shadow and where solutions for problems may be found. Reflection is often carried out where investigation has been already undertaken extensively without any important outcome, so smart questions are able to bring to light new spaces where maybe the key is to be found, as in the following funny story by Watzlawick (1983, p 31):

Under a street lamp there stands a man, slightly intoxicated, who is searching for something. In the lighted area he searches over and over. A policeman comes along, asks him what he is looking for, and the man answers, “My keys.” Now they both search. After a while the policeman wants to know whether the man is sure that he lost his keys there, and the latter answers, “No, not here, back there – but there it is much too dark.

Good questions are able to generate knowledge because they are vital in connecting, recalling and searching for old, lost (in fact some details are almost forgotten and not considere...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on the author and contributor
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• One: The never-ending cycle of reflective practice
• Two: What is a mistake in social work?
• Three: Risks, responsibilities and opportunities from mistakes in social work
• Four: Questions and narratives: basic tools for enhancing learning from professional mistakes
• Five: Feedback and other tools for learning together from mistakes in organisations
• Conclusion: The start of a never-ending process
• References