Reflection and Reflective Practice

Reflection and reflective practice are seen as core to professional development in many health professions, encouraging a continuous learning approach involving knowledge acquisition and practice improvement. This chapter explores reflection in its various constructs and the variety of ways that it can be utilised within the professional practice, discussing the nature and function of reflection and the associated learning complexities. It offers a brief introduction of group reflection, clinical supervision, problem based learning (PBL) and action learning to demonstrate how these can be utilised and applied to the educational and practice environment. The chapter also discusses models of reflection and how these can help professionals to structure their thoughts and subsequent reflective writing. Driscoll's model of reflection has its origins in clinical supervision, with the model encouraging a structured reflective approach to the clinical supervision encounter, suggesting that reflective practice is essential for this process.