2: Professional Reflective Practice

In the previous chapter we established that reflection is a natural human function that enables learning. We all reflect on our experiences and actions to one degree or another in order to learn and to improve our ability to live and work. Reflection has been part of human development for millennia and it has been formally recognised as a pivotal element for almost 100 years when the educationalist Dewey (1933) first made the link between reflection and experiential learning. Identifying reflection as an active, conscious process. More recent authors such as Schön (1987) and Reid (1993) agree that effective learning occurs when practitioners experience a problematic and often complex event, attempting then to make sense of it. In this chapter we consider more structured approaches to reflective practice, looking at continuous improvement within the context of practice. The Practitioner Perspectives presented at the end of the chapter illuminate the use of reflection in the UK medical profession and also examine the very different setting of elite professional sport, football and handball in particular. The Practitioner Perspectives we introduce in this chapter are very rich in analysing the context of reflective practice and also in highlighting key issues of sharing learning, time, emotion, subjectivity and attribution. The practitioner settings and examples of elite sport we use are high-pressure, intense work settings where the stakes are very high, life and death in the medical and healthcare cases. I have deliberately chosen these settings to amplify the problems and possibilities of good reflective practice while acknowledging that for most of us, extreme consequences and extreme emotions are not the norm.