Community Learning Development Resource 601 – 03
DEVELOPING OUR PRACTICE BY BEING REFLECTIVE
SUMMARY
For the worker as a learner, the learning agenda is long and challenging. One key learning skill to develop and use continuously is that of being a Reflective Practitioner able to learn from practical work experiences. This resource identifies features of a number of work-based experiential learning opportunities:
Turn experience into learning through reflection – review experiences
- Uncertainty is a key issue in professional practice – practitioners need to develop skills to handle uncertainty in the absence of a formula approach, which spells out exactly how the practitioner should act
- Practitioners need to be able to deal with and learn from the unique situations they find themselves in
- Adopting an attitude of continually learning from our experience, (reflective practice) will avoid practice becoming routine and repetitive
- Workers are likely to find themselves in new territory/situations and need to continually reflect and learn from each new situation and their experience of it
- The nature of widening participation, learning in the community work and community development work is that the ‘tablets of stone’ are not yet all available and in place. The work becomes ‘ground-breaking’ the further it is distanced from provider institutions, formal learning and what we know about existing practice
- There is an urgent need for group reflection opportunities, for workers to be able to disseminate and reflect upon their experiences, practice and learning, with other colleagues
- Recording experiences and reflecting upon the recordings in order to review what has happened, is an essential part of the skilled development workers practice. Having the term ‘development’ in a job title implies uncertainty and change, and the likelihood of needing to learn much from experience and experiment
- It is a lost opportunity if something works really well and we forget what it was
- Community development and the connections made between learning, capacity building and regeneration make up an area of practice, which is at the margins – the pioneering fringe, and textbooks do not yet provide all the answers.
Practical hints:
- Find your own way of recording practice and how it works, what works well and what doesn’t – your method of recording needs to be a way that works for you
- Get into the habit of recording and making time to reflect and review
- Find ways of reviewing your recordings and experience that include coming to conclusions and possibilities, options and ways forward
- Find ways of translating what you find during reflection and review, into something for the future, a plan, a prompt or a revelation
- Be positive about sharing good practice as well as concerns – we don’t learn enough from what is going on around us when we are in the middle of it – often we feel isolated and cut-off in our own little world of work
- Try to overcome the experiences and feelings – that all you have time to do is to record and report (the administrative workload), and go for the practice development bit as a priority
- Find and promote ways of disseminating, discussing and developing practice – find space with others for reflection and learning within your work.