Developing Reflective Writing Skills for Practice

1. Faculty of Health and Social Care SciencesKINGSTON UNIVERSITY. ST GEORGE’S UNIVERSITY OF LONDONDEVELOPING SKILLS FOR PRACTICEMSW 002REFLECTIVE WRITINGJohn Archambeault, MSWThursday, 23 October 2008 10 am – 1 pm

2. Beginning Writing ‘You can’t write the wrong thing. Whatever you write will be right – for you . . . .  Write whatever is in your head, uncensored.  Write without stoppingfor about six minutes.  Don’t think about what you are writing, it may be disconnected and seem to be rubbish – but don’t stop to thinkor be critical.  Write – allowing it to flow – with no reference to spelling, grammar, proper form.  Give yourself permission to say anything, whatever it is. You don’t even have to reread it. Whatever you write it cannot be the wrong thing – because no one will read your writing in this form.’ (Bolton, 2001, pp. 121–122.)

3. What Bolton calls the ‘Reflective Splurge’  ‘Write in the same way as you did during the six minutes.  Write with a focus. Restrict limiting questions.  Choose the first event that comes to mind.  Set a limit to the writing – between 20 to 30 minutes.  Recreate the situation as memory gives it.  Consider it fiction.  Refrain from judgements.  Allow reactions, emotions and feelings.’ (Adapted from Bolton, 2001, pp. 123–124.)

4. Writing as Reflecting Write about: When I interviewed a service user for this class. Write for about 20 minutes. (Bolton, 2001, pp. 124.)

5. Gibbs Reflective Cycle

6. Mezirow’s Seven Hierarchical Levels of Reflection 1. Reflectivity: an awareness of specific perceptions, meanings or behaviour. 2. Affective reflectivity: the individual’s awareness of feelings about what is being perceived, thought or acted on. 3. Discriminant reflectivity: assessing the efficacy of perceptions, thoughts and behaviour. 4. Judgemental reflectivity: an awareness of value judgements made on perceptions, thoughts and behaviour. 5. Conceptual reflectivity: assessing the adequacy of the concepts used for the judgment. 6. Psychic reflectivity: recognition of the habit of making precipitant judgments on limited information. 7. Theoretical reflectivity: an awareness that one set of perspectives, e.g. taken for granted practice or culture, may explain personal experience less satisfactorily than another perspective. Also an awareness of reasons for a habit of precipitant judgment or conceptual inadequacy. (Mezirow, 1981, pp. 12-13, cited by Newton, 2004, p.159)

7. Reading and Reflection Readover your last piece of writing. Take a moment to reflect. Briefly record any initial reactions.

8. Schön’s Reflection-on-Action‘In critical reflection, the use of a critical incident as the basis for knowledge generation can be considered as “reflection-on-action” rather than “reflection-in-action”’ (Schön, 1983).‘The critical incident is firmly in the past, and is represented as a learning opportunity for the future from this selected incident.’ (D’ Cruz et al., 2006, p. 11.)

9. Refining the Reflective Splurge into Reflective WritingQuestions that could be asked or considered and answered during the reflective writing process:Why?What?How?When?Who?Where?

10. A Range of Reflective Writing NON REFLECTIVE ––––––––––– REFLECTIVE– Non reflective – Critical reconstruction descriptive writing – Problem solving – Metacognition – Dialectical reasoning

11. Mezirow Simplified Affective reflectivity = Feeling Discriminant reflectivity = Thinking Judgemental reflectivity = Evaluating Performance (Mezirow, 1981, cited by Yip, 2006)

12. Ruch’s Types of Reflection Ruch (2000) summarised four types of reflection:  technical  practical  process and  critical. (Ruch, 2000. p. 101 cited by Yip, 2006, p. 246)

13. Some Questions for Reflection Brockbank and McGill (2007, p. 29) introduce the following questions building on the work of Schön:  Is what I am doing appropriate at this moment?  Do I need to alter, amend, change what I am doing and being in order to adjust to changing circumstance, to get back into balance, to attend accurately, etc?  If I am not on the right track, is there a better way?

14. Reflections and Comments

15. REFERENCES Bolton, G. (2005) Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development, 2nd edn. London: Sage. Brockbank, A. and McGill, I. (2007) Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education, 2nd edn. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Chambers, P. (2003) Narrative and reflective practice: recording and understanding experience, Educational Action Research, 11, (3), pp. 403–14. D’Cruz, H., Gillingham, P. and Melendez, S. (2006) Reflexivity, its meanings are relevance for social work: A critical review of the literature, British Journal of Social Work, 37, (1), pp. 73–90. Johns, C. (2006) Engaging Reflection in Practice: A Narrative Approach: Oxford: Blackwell. Newton, J. (2004) Learning to reflect: a journey, Reflective Practice, 5, (2), pp. 155–66. Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Yip, K. (2006) Reflectivity in social work practice with clients with mental-health illness: Promise and challenge in education, International Social Work, 49, pp. 245–55. Available at: http://isw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/2/245 (Accessed 7 June 2008)