#youtwork #reflectivepractice #youthworkers #informaleducation #doublelooplearning #responsivepractice #supervision #support #time #emotionalintelligence
I have been in discussion with a group of #youthworkers about the importance of reflective practice as a youth worker. The ability to consider, review and evaluate and promote enhanced responses using reflection was deemed as an important professional skill for the informal educator.
It is interesting that styles of reflection and purposeful use of reflection are noted regularly and yet perhaps not applied with such enthusiasm in broader professions that work with young people, but this is open to individual practitioner interpretation of the value vs competing expectations of workload or caseload and is worthy of much more research and discussion.
The specific discussion with colleagues centred on the basis that a majority of our work is under some level of evaluative review (measuring) and incorporates reflection usually on a team level. The advantage here, is the developing ‘group think’ that incorporates holistic growth and responses and meeting of targets and goals, potentially vision and alignment to youth work values. The potential disadvantage however, is how we encourage quieter voices to contribute and be valued due to the criteria under review, those that need longer to process before responding and dominant perspectives from line manager or restraints and expectations about the progression of a piece of work.
I wondered for a while whether the benefits of reflective practice are given the time, space and support necessary to truly encourage professional development?
This blog post will consider the value of enhanced reflection for practice and the support mechanisms in place to create the effectiveness we strive for to compliment young people’s lives through our practice.
There are a wide range of reflective tools and methods that come to mind, those of David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, Donald Shoen’s IN/ON action reflection, Rolfe’s ‘What?’, ‘So What?’, ‘Now What? And Gibbs’ stages of reflection. The majority of practitioners’ have a preferred model that encourages thinking and works towards an enhanced emotional intelligence of thoughts, feelings, action and developments.
Whist there are clear similarities between the various models, it is important to remember that each has an intended and purposeful process that can be specific to a particular experience or event that may need the ‘user’ to locate for instance, more on; ‘how it felt’ = Gibbs is valuable here or ‘how it functions’ = Rolfe would be a good fit, and so on.
Reflective practice when used well, encourages a creativity, exploration, raises questions valuable of research or reading to comprehend the particles that emerge as important. It is the valuable learning from reflection that can create a realisation during the process of reflection. It is in this critical stage where we can be become much more aware and affected by the findings/outcomes/complex thinking and importantly impact in and on our practice that may require effective and supportive supervision to encourage exploration.
When the lightening strikes and we need to explore further, supervision should be a space in which our own practice reflections are shared to create a developmental approach to individual practice enhancement and career development – of key importance here is; we are not all the same and so various techniques may be needed to guide the individuals exploration of important topics and themes that our work can draw out. This benefits the range of individual knowledge, skills and capacities and celebrates diversity rather than cloning professionals.
The sometimes uncomfortable space of reflection from our experiential learning can create opportunity to gain a true insight into the transformative power of deep reflection as oppose to the simplistic and formulaic processes of ‘act and react’ that can often be found in a speedy evaluation or on the way home after a session. Effective space to reflect allows us to pick up and put down as we are in control of the process.
The valuable opportunity and time to reflect is vital to allow practice experience, analysis, theory to come together and form developed thinking – breaking down the situation into manageable particles within reflections and separating the wants, needs and requirements of others to be able to be present in this important learning process.
By using a safe space and distance alongside time away from the working environment and its constraints allow the subconscious self to establish real learning and meaning from the complex and challenging emotions that can sometimes occur.
Borton captures this well in that reflection enables the individual to see a true reflection of a ‘second self’ and immersion into deep thinking to confront the realities that exist in the world and therefore that we are complicit with and move from a place of not knowing to a place of acknowledging can facilitate emotional and therefore practical change.
The implications for practice and therefore leadership is to create a balanced environment in which the ever changing policy, targets, inspections, monitoring and standardisation that are often inappropriately collated and represented as ‘a change agile team’ moves towards a more empathetically time enabled opportunity for practitioners to truly reflect and promote genuine and considered responses. This occurs in an immediate sense in the way that one considers personal practice development and equally to the cultures of developing professionalism over disempowering compliance to dominant norms.
The ability to encourage the unique capacity of our profession to flourish exists in the development of the professional that is active in reflection, appraisal, conflict resolution and emerging with new discoveries and ideas through this honest and creative process.
Effective supervision that focuses on the individual practitioners agenda to positively identify their personal and professional development and coaching through the more challenging aspects at present to fuel a workforce that is emotionally well, empowered, agile through their contribution and development and active in the analysis and appraisal of personal, organisational and structural change.
The feelings of isolation and disconnection that colleagues shared due to an inability to consider how change would impact on self and therefore others inclusive of young people characterises the pace in which practitioners are required to respond in contemporary practice and it is clear that there are questions about the validity and effectiveness of certain interventions, social responses that the field may or may not agree with and are silenced due to a lack of time to reflect and platforms to reflect our new discoveries and ideas to contribute in enhanced and dynamic ways.
The process of reflection of our practice is intended to be challenging on occasion and promotes a valuable internal dialogue around the important aspect of our work that can be conflictual, the ironing out of complex ideologies, translating funding requirements to an ethical and responsive youth work that envisions and captures the heart of why we do the work and how our values and beliefs are central to aspects of these conflicts.
Dewey observed that reflective consideration is a process of travelling backwards and forwards to source what we enjoy or suffer and how we reconcile this thinking is part of the discovery of a new world and not a conclusion. The discovery of our value in the connection to people, experiences, ideas, activities and approaches that manifest in who we are as practitioners.
What methods of reflection do colleagues find useful or beneficial, it would be great to hear how reflection has informed practice and development and any tools that your teams and individuals are using to develop their work, please contribute to the discussion in the Youth Work Common Room via the following link in the general discussion space.
#youtwork #reflectivepractice #youthworkers #informaleducation #doublelooplearning #responsivepractice #supervision #support #time #emotionalintelligence
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