Reflective Practice

So on to Thing #5 of CPD23 things and musings on reflective practice. This is a subject which I have given a lot of thought over in the last few years. I was prompted to do this when my colleagues and I were sent on a specially designed 10 week course at Northumbria University, before we opened the new Newcastle City Library in 2009 and it resulted in us asking as a group to have reflective practice built in to our monthly meetings. This proposal was presented to our senior management and included the following:

"Library and Information Officers (LIOs) are going through substantial changes to their working practices and in the new city library we will be required to provide solutions to any problems that arise. As a result, we believe we need do the following:-

• Develop a greater collective group awareness
• Become smarter at sharing information
• Establish priorities between teams in order to overcome isolation and be effective managers
• Reflect regularly on events and working practices in order to celebrate and integrate successful ways of working and to ensure that we learn from mistakes and work is not duplicated.

What will LIOs gain from reflective practice?

• Ability to develop creative answers to difficulties and enhanced problem solving skills
• Enhanced ability to evaluate and action plan for success (eliminating what doesn’t work, boosting what does, and sharing the result)
• Confidence and the skills to be an effective manager
• LIOs will be actively contributing to their own professional awareness and development through peer support"

As a result of this consultation, we were given 30 mins together as LIOs at the start of each of our meetings. This time was invaluable as we were involved in the opening of the City Library and has been useful since.  For example, I attended a course by Karen Blakeman on 'All about Google' course in Newcastle on 31st March 2011 (it was brilliant and I would highly recommend it) and I wanted to feed back what I learnt on that day's course in an hour's session with colleagues. It was great to do this, even though we still need to discuss further about what we could do with this learning next and how we we're going to take it on as a group. Reflection never ends!

However, reflecting is not always about reflecting on things as a group and I realise that I do it naturally ever day as part of my job and sometimes it's never written down. An example of this can be seen in  an e-book taster class that I ran for a group of customers who are visually impaired (VIPs). I had never delivered a class to VIPs before and neither had any of my colleagues, so I went into the class with a certain gaps in my experience and not knowing what would work and what needed to be tweaked. And I came out of the class knowing exactly what needed to be changed (let's say that it wasn't the most successful class I've ever ran due to technology and staffing issues amongst some of the reasons!). However, I was able to come back and say to my colleague who was running the same class only a few hours later, what I would have done differently and what the set up of the class was (we were using the Newcastle Blind Society's computers and set up). So Luke went off armed with this knowledge and delivered a much better quality session to another group of VIP learners. Just an example of reflective practice in action, with nothing written down but simply passed on orally.

Having said that, I definitely think there is a place for written down relective practice, something which I appreciated during the Chartership process, and I do try and undertake it after I've attended conferences and training. However, I do need to be better at reflecting more quickly after these days / events and I'm hoping that blogging will provide me with a better way of doing this. I need to keep reminding myself that it is a very simple process as Greenway (1995) says plan, do and review. Can't be that hard can it?!!