Reflective
practice is about the process of thinking about your practice and taking
personal responsibility for improving your professional skills. Reflection enables
you to review the positive aspects of your own practice in order to build on
your successes and to identify areas for improvement or further development.
What is Reflective practice : Reflective practice is the analysis of
everyday working practices to improve practices and promote professional
development. It involves critically analysing yours actions with the goal of
improving yours professional practices.
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Working in a
professional manner needs a continuous process of reflection, which involves
looking at your practices, ideas and actions, then evaluating their
effectiveness in order to make improvements. Reflection stages are as follows –
Stage 1: Description of the event
Describe in detail the event you
are reflecting on. Include where you were;who else was there; why were you
there; what were you doing; what were other people doing; what the context of
the event was; what happened; what your part in this was; what parts did the
other people play; what was the result.
Stage 2: Feelings and Thoughts (Self
awareness)
At this
stage, try to recall and explore those things that were going on inside your
head. Include:
- How you were feeling when the event started?
- What you were thinking about at the time?
- How did it make you feel?
- How did other people make you feel?
- How did you feel about the outcome of the event?
- What do you think about it now?
Stage 3: Evaluation
Try to evaluate or make a
judgement about what has happened. Consider what was good about the experience
and what was bad about the experience or what did or did not go so well.
Stage 4: Analysis
Break the event down into its
component parts so they can be explored separately. You may need to ask more
detailed questions about the answers to the last stage. Include:
- What went well?
- What did you do well?
- What did others do well?
- What went wrong or did not turn out how it should have done?
- In what way did you or others contribute to this?
Stage 5: Conclusion
This differs from the evaluation
stage in that now you have explored the issue from different angles and have a
lot of information to base your judgement. It is here that you are likely to
develop insight into you own and other people’s behaviour in terms of how they
contributed to the outcome of the event. Remember the purpose of reflection is
to learn from an experience. Without detailed analysis and honest exploration
that occurs during all the previous stages, it is unlikely that all aspects of
the event will be taken into account and therefore valuable opportunities for
learning can be missed. During this stage you should ask yourself what you
could have done differently.
Stage 6: Action Plan
During this stage you should
think yourself forward into encountering the event again and to plan what you
would do – would you act differently or would you be likely to do the same?
Why is reflective practice so important?
Reflecting on your practice can enhance
and improve your confidence and self esteem because you can look at what you
are doing well, the things you have learnt and achieved and feel good about
yourself especially if you have done something with ease that you used to find
difficult or if you have done something good you never thought you would do.
This then gives you confidence to continue working well and to aim to try other
new things or to use what new skills or knowledge you have gained in your
practice. As a social care worker you are
responsible for providing care to the best of your ability to service user and
their families. You need to focus on your knowledge, skills and behaviour to
ensure that you are able to meet the demands made on you by this commitment.
Reflective practice is part of
the requirement for social care worker constantly to update professional
skills. Keeping a portfolio or plan or action offers considerable opportunity
for reflection on ongoing development. Supervision and reviews enable you to
identify strengths and areas of opportunity for future development.
You should consider the ways in which you interact
and communicate with your colleagues, service user and other professionals. The
profession depends on a culture of mutual support. You should aim to become
self-aware, self-directing and in touch with any environment.
Quality and
effective service delivery is about providing a service in the best possible
way. It is about anticipating, conforming to and sometimes exceeding the
clients’ expectations and requirements
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Maintaining the effectiveness of service
In
maintaining the effectiveness of the service, either at a service provider or
individual worker level, it is essential to be clear on what the quality
standards are and how they should be put into practice, and to monitor and
regularly review how the service is performing in relation to those standards.
When you will reflect on your practice
and evaluate them, you may bring some significant change in your practice to
improve quality of individual’s life and service provision.
Some services
arrange a process called a ‘self-assessment’, where each year they compare
staff and client views on how they meet the standards. This information is
combined and together, staff and clients decide on some actions for improving
the service for the following year.
You will have
to follow the codes of conduct and practice what is set out by government and
your organisation In order to provide effective quality service.
As a social care worker
you will have criteria to guide your practice and be clear about what standards
of conduct you are expected to meet. You are encouraged to use the codes to
examine your own practice and to look for areas in which you can improve.
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To work accordance with
codes of practice and conduct a social care worker must :
·
Protect the rights and
promote the interests of service users and carers
·
Strive to establish and
maintain the trust and confidence of service users and carers
·
Promote the independence of
service users while protecting them as far as possible from danger or harm
·
Respect the rights of
service users while seeking to ensure that your behaviour does not harm them or
other people
·
Uphold public trust and
confidence in social care services
· Be accountable for the
quality of their work and take responsibility for maintaining and improving
their knowledge and skills.
Remember, you will have to comply with general
codes of practice and conduct in your reflective practice or including your
reflective practice in order to provide better quality services.
Checklist to evaluate practice :
- How did you approach your work?
- Was your approach positive?
- How did the way you worked affect the service users?
- How did the way you worked affect your colleague?
- Which was the best aspect of the work you did?
- Which was the worst aspect of the work you did?
- Are there any areas in which you could improve?
- What are they and how you will you tackle them?
---------------------------------- Foisal Talukdar
