Dietetics:ProfessionalPractice/Reflective Practice in Year 5 2019
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Relevance of topic to dietetics student learning
- Reflective practice is an important tool for professional development to help us improve and evolve as practitioners.
- Reflecting on the good and bad interactions with patients and other healthcare professionals allows for continual improvement.
- Reflective practice enables us to explore our personal values and biases, and how they influence our behaviours and actions in professional practice.
Summary of key principles
Characteristics of Reflective Practice
- Reflective practice is an active and deliberate cognitive process:
- This process takes effort and is not the same as simply thinking about situations. Rather, a set of structured questions and procedures that help promote deep level self-reflection are crucial in understanding situations and how to move forward.
- The aim of reflective practice is to be transformative:
- Reflective process can change your practice and how you approach interactions, criticisms and difficult situations moving forward.
- Reflective practice can be both individual or collaborative:
- It is important to reflect on your own, but it can also be valuable to reflect on your experiences with classmates, preceptors, or others in within your social network. It helps to gather different perspectives and reflect better to debrief a situation.
Reflection vs. Reflexivity
- Reflection is particularly useful to critically probe students’ and clinicians’ metacognitive skills (ie, thinking about their thinking) to explore the thinking process behind a clinical decision.
- Reflexivity is linked to reflective practice and focuses on awareness of how students’ and clinicians’ values and beliefs interact with others' to influence their perspectives and behaviors.
Sample Questions
Here are some examples of questions to ask during reflection:
- Am I letting matters that are out of my control stress me out?
- Am I achieving the goals that I’ve set for myself?
- Am I taking anything for granted?
- What is my greatest accomplishment since being in the program?
- What has pushed me outside of my comfort zone in the program? Or, what has been the biggest challenge that I have encountered?
- What are my expectations of practice education?
Digital media learning resource #1
Here is a brief "streeter" style podcast featuring practicing dietitians and current year-5 practice education students addressing the questions: "what does practice education mean to you?" and "why is practice education important?".
Digital media learning resource #2
File:Reflective Practice Infographic.pdf
Here is an infographic outlining a guide to approaching reflective practice in year-5 and beyond.
Online resources for further learning
The REFLECT Mnemonic:
The Gibbs Reflective Cycle:
Readings on Reflective Practice:
- "Reflective practice in health care and how to reflect effectively" (Koshy et al., 2017)
- “Power and Promise of Narrative for Advancing Physical Therapist Education and Practice” (Greenfield et al., 2015)
Student authors
Authors: Katie Bartel, Natalie Cryderman, Gladys Liu, Paulina Naylor, Nisha Takhar, and Marianne Thomas
Developed March 31, 2019