Reflection for mentors

Reflection for mentors This presentation provides information and tips to support you in the process of reflecting on practice with your students. It includes: Descriptions of reflection and the process of reflection Why reflection is relevant to you and your students Skills for reflection Reflective frameworks Helping your students to get started with reflection Ideas for how you could use this as part of your annual mentor update

We want to encourage you to: Get into reflective dialogue with your students. Use reflective frameworks to help you with this. Help your students to think about developing their skills for reflection. Enthuse you to continue to develop as reflective practitioners yourselves.

WHAT IS REFLECTION? Reflection involves reviewing experience from practice so that it can be described, analysed and evaluated. We can then use this to inform and change future practice (Bulman 2008) Reflection also involves sharing one’s practice with others; this takes courage and open-mindedness and means that we need to be willing to take on board and act on constructive criticism (Dewey 1933) Simply put - Reflection is a process of making sense of experience in order to move on and do better as a practitioner. (Bulman et al 2012)

WHAT does the process of REFLECTION involve? By engaging in reflection people are usually engaging in a period of thinking in order to examine often complex experiences or situations. The period of thinking (reflection) allows the individual to make sense of an experience, perhaps to liken the experience to other similar experiences and to place it in context. Faced with complex decisions, thinking it through (reflecting) allows the individual to separate out the various influencing factors and to come to a reasoned decision or course of action Clarke and Graham (1996:26)

Reflection is significant because… It can help us to challenge practice rather than ‘working on automatic pilot’. This matters because people matter! We need to deliver AND constructively consider the care we give to our clients. WE NEED TO SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS TO DO THIS.

We want to encourage you AND YOUR STUDENTS to: Critically think about your practice Learn from your experiences Make sense of your experiences Come to understand the effects of your practice

In order to: Learn from your mistakes, because they matter to people. Move on and do better next time. Build up a repertoire of practice experiences that are useful to you. Keep on improving and challenging practice.

Skills for reflection Developing skills for reflection is essential. You will have developed these skills as part of your practitioner and mentor education and as you have progressed in your practice career. They are skills that you can continue to develop and that you can nurture in your students. Self-awareness Description Critical Analysis Synthesis Evaluation

Skills for reflection Self awareness enables a person to analyse feelings. It involves an honest examination of how a situation has affected the individual and how the individual has affected the situation. Description involves the ability to recognise and recollect accurately significant events and key features of an experience and to give an account of the situation (TIP: Keep focused with this bit.)

SKILLS FOR REFLECTION Critical Analysis involves examining the components of a situation, identifying existing knowledge, challenging assumptions and imagining and exploring alternatives. A critical analysis of knowledge is undertaken which involves examining how relevant knowledge is to an individual situation. Synthesis The integration of new knowledge with previous knowledge. It can be used in a creative way to solve problems and to predict likely consequences of actions. Evaluation Enables a judgment to be made about the value of something. Synthesis and evaluation are crucial in the development of a new perspective

MORE ON CRITICAL ANALYSIS Separation of a whole into its component parts, detailed examination of those parts. To make judgements about the strengths and weaknesses of the different parts as well as the whole. Identifying existing knowledge relevant to the situation, exploring feelings about the situation. Identifying and challenging assumptions, imagining and exploring other courses of action.

SYNTHESIS Building up ideas into a connected and coherent whole Original thinking Creativity Building on our knowledge, skills and attitudes leads to fresh insights/new perspectives on practice

Reflective frameworks Reflective frameworks are really useful for novices. The new PAD has some useful frameworks for students to use as well as other tips to help them with their reflection. We want to encourage you to use these frameworks with students in order to develop and deepen their reflection. Gibbs Reflective Cycle is most popular amongst our undergraduates and has been updated for you below. You can encourage your students to use this cycle in their written reflection and also use it to give you a useful structure when you reflect with them.

Reflective FRAMEWORKS Gibbs (1998) updated by Bulman 2012 Description- What Happened? What were your Feelings and how did you react? Initial Evaluation of the experience – What was good and bad about it? Critical Analysis – What sense did you make of the experience? Conclusion – What have you learnt from reflecting on this experience? Final Evaluation and Action Plan – What would you do differently?

DESCRIPTION What happened? Describe what happened. Keep focused on your description; don’t make judgements or draw conclusions.

Keep focused on your emotions, don’t be tempted to analyse yet. FEELINGS What were your feelings and how did you react? Keep focused on your emotions, don’t be tempted to analyse yet. We need to recognise and challenge our emotions in order to develop sensitive critical thinking about practice.

INITIAL EVALUATION OF THE EXPERIENCE What was good and bad about the experience? Evaluate your initial feelings and reactions in order to get to the heart of what really concerned you (positive or negative) about the experience. By doing this, you should be able to identify and attend to key issue/s which will allow you to move on to critical analysis. NB: It is important to keep focused, so try to choose just one or two issues. Then you can move on to develop some in-depth critical analysis rather than just ‘skim the surface’ of many.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS What sense did you make of the experience? Critically analyse what was going on. Were people’s experiences similar or different to yours, and in what ways? What themes seem to be emerging from your analysis? How do these compare with your previous experiences? Can you challenge any assumptions now? NB: Make use of knowledge/ideas from outside your experience to develop and inform your analysis, e.g. experts, mentors, policy, research, law and ethics, literature, clinical papers, reviews, discussion papers. How do these compare with your experience? This moves the reflective process on from looking at our feelings and initial evaluation of the experience to further critical analysis in order to check out what other people know/what other information is out there in order to compare and contrast it with our own experiences. In this way, we can begin to develop our critical understanding of practice.

CONCLUSIONS What have you learnt from reflecting on this experience? What have you learnt about: yourself, your self-awareness, your practice? What have you learnt that you would recommend for practice in general (i.e. social, political, cultural, ethical issues)?

FINAL EVALUATION AND ACTION PLAN What would you do differently? What would you do if this type of situation arose again? What steps will you take, based on what you’ve learnt, to develop your future practice? How will you decide if your practice has been improved?

Other reflective frameworks in the student PAD You can use these with your students too! The What? Model of Structured Reflection and associated trigger questions (Driscoll 2007) Reflective Framework. Stephenson (1994.179) In: Bulman (2008:230) John’s Model of Structured Reflection – 14th edition (2004) in Johns and Freshwater (2005:3) Driscoll, J. (2007) (Ed.) Practising Clinical Supervision: A Reflective Approach for Healthcare Professionals Bailliere Tindall: Elsevier, Edinburgh, UK. Reflective Framework. Stephenson (1994.179) In: Bulman, C. (2008). Help to Get You Started. In:Bulman, C. and Schutz, S. (2008). (Eds) Reflective Practice in Nursing (4th Ed.) Blackwell Scientific Publications: Oxford. Johns, C. and Freshwater, D. (2005) Transforming Nursing Through Reflective Practice. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.

Helping you to get your students STARTED WITH reflection Encourage them to be curious and ask questions about practice – gets into dialogue. Show them that you are willing to ask questions about your own practice – that you are eager to change and challenge. Work on building up a relationship of trust with your students. Try using reflective frameworks to scaffold and support your reflection with students Encourage your students to keep a reflective diary (keep one yourself!) Remember there is information on reflection in the students’ PAD Use what you have learnt on your mentor course about facilitation – support and challenge your students as they reflect on their practice Get into reflective supervision yourself

Your role in relation to the Student’s written reflections in the PAD Students are encouraged to write at least 2 reflections during their placement, one for the midway review and one for the final review. Your role is to learn about the student and their experiences from the reflection, it can help inform your assessment of the student. You are not being asked to ‘mark’ the student’s reflective writing; unless you are confident you do not have to comment on writing skills; link lecturers will suggest developments to the student

Things you could do to use this presentation as part of your annual mentor update Write your own reflective account about how you have supported an aspect of student development. Consider reading more about reflection or an aspect of reflection such as critical analysis and then bullet point what you have learnt. Consider learning more about reflection and developing a presentation (power point or poster or written update) for colleagues. Consider the way you work alongside students and find ways to introduce reflective practice within your pattern of working without increasing your workload.

References Bulman, C. & Schutz, S. (2008) (eds) Reflective Practice in Nursing (4th ed). Blackwell: Oxford, UK. Bulman, C., Lathlean, J. and Gobbi, M. (2012) The concept of reflection in nursing: Qualitative findings on student and teacher perspectives, Nurse Education Today  32 (2012), pp. e8-e13 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2011.10.007 Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. DC Heath and Company, Massachusetts. Driscoll, J. (2007) (ed.) Practising Clinical Supervision: A Reflective Approach for Healthcare Professionals Bailliere Tindall: Elsevier, Edinburgh, UK. Clarke, D.J. and Graham, M. (1996) Reflective practice, the use of reflective diaries by experienced registered nurses. Nursing Review. Vol.15, Autumn, No.1, 26 - 29. Bulman, C. (2008). Help to Get You Started. In: Bulman,C. and Schutz, S. (2008) Johns, C. and Freshwater, D. (2005) Transforming Nursing Through Reflective Practice. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.