Reflective Practice Research Paper

Throughout personal professional development reflection is essential, allowing health care professionals to self-develop by revisiting events and analysing areas in which improvements and learning would ensure a positive impact on their future practice. The Nursing and Midwifery Council, (NMC, 2010) notes that all health care practitioners must be self-aware in their own values and principles which could affect their practice. Ensuring they maintain personal and professional development while learning through supervision, feedback and reflection.

The transition from a newly graduate nurse to a confident, capable nurse is a difficult evolution for any individual. The use of reflection enables the individual to develop their skills and knowledge in a structured way, encourages change when possible and allows for acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings. There are several types of reflective models and it is important for the individual to find what best suits them. Reflection can be useful to learn from experience, develop critical thinking, teach emotional maturity, and empower graduate nurses while teaching them a lifelong skill.

Experience is sometimes regarded as the best teacher. Many things can be learned in a classroom and by formal academic study, but many cannot. Reflective practice is a form approach to learning through experience. Reflective practice is a lifelong learning process to promote continual development of the nurse. Reflective writing practice helps the nurse to gain knowledge and to challenge their own ideas and concepts. The idea of reflective practice is not only to see what happened, but to see the situation through new eyes, eyes that can help in personal growth and to develop ways to respond differently in the future.

In this essay, I will be using the Gibbs Reflective Cycle (1988) to reflect on my first-hand experience on a specific matter during my first placement allocation as a student nurse. The Gibbs Reflective Cycle is a six-stage model which I believe will allow me to somewhat analyse and give a clear insight into my experience. As stated by Somerville et al (2004), reflective practice within nursing is described as “a process by which practitioners can better understand themselves in order to be able to build on existing strengths and take appropriate future action.”

The fate and future of nursing are now more than ever dependent upon self-care, health promotion and self-generated coping and healing modalities. Working as a health care provider is more than just a job, it is a career. However, being a reflective nurse is extremely important, “Reflection is an essential attribute to the development of autonomous, critical and advanced practitioners” (Caldwell & Grobbel, 2013). It allows for nurses to reflect on the day’s practice, whether they treated the patients with the best possible care or whether improvements were required. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show the significant importance of reflection within the nursing profession.

Personal reflection in nursing is essential and critical as it allows for continuous development and re-assessment of skills whilst working within a health care setting (Reflective practice: a tool to enhance professional practice 2011, pp.1-3). Personal reflection is important as reflective practice allows for the ability for one to reflect and examine their actions and experiences which overall will increase and enhance their clinical knowledge, as well as developing and improving their practice (Reflective practice: a tool to

This paragraph is about the concept of reflection and how it aids professional development in nursing. To do this, we first have to understand what reflection and reflective practise is. The Nursing and midwifery board of Australia’s National competency standards for the registered nurse under the Critical thinking and analysis domain requires the nurse to reflects on own practice to identify professional development needs. This comes under the heading of: Participates in professional development to enhance nursing practice (Nursing and Midwifery Board of

Critical reflection within the profession of nursing helps us adapt our way of thinking in order to help us set goals and learn from our past experiences. As students, it is ideal for us to reflect on our past lectures and what we have learnt in order for us to determine how this information fits into our own ideas and concepts within our own lives. By connecting the content learnt in class to our own experiences, it is easier for the student to connect with the material in order to understand it more in depth. When reflecting upon the class material learnt in Dr. Malloy’s lecture, on October 2nd, there may be several ways to critically reflect upon regarding this specific class.

For the practitioner, the benefits of reflection includes the identification of learning needs, continual development in practice, the ability to provide evidence-based care and the elimination of routine practice (Jasper et al. 2011 and Bulman 2013). Furthermore, as part of the NMC (2015) code of professional standard and a significant component of the revalidation process, reflective nurses do not only fulfil the regulatory requirements, but to some extent, safeguard the success of their revalidation process.

According to Hogston and Simpson (2002, p398) reflection is "a process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to better describe, analyse and evaluate, and so inform learning about practice". Wolverson (2000, p24) includes this is an important process for all nurses wishing to improve their practice. This will be investigated using a reflective nursing model.

One important key that is fundamental to study skills is reflective practice. Stimulating personal and professional growth, closing the gap between theory and practice along with the improvement of the quality of care have association with engagement in reflective practice. Platzer et al 1997 identified that learning through reflection is more potent if there is an understanding of frameworks that encourage a structural process to guide the act of reflection. There are several models, which will help me to involve in the process of reflection. All of them could not be of my use. It is essential that I make choice of the framework that is most comfortable for me and will best assist me to learn from my experience. The most important aspect of engaging in reflective writing is being able to demonstrate a changed conceptual perspective. The process of reflective writing will lead to more than just gaining knowledge and it should also challenge the concepts and theories by which I make sense of

Reflective practice has helped many people to improve their learning. It is a valuable tool often used by healthcare and education providers to improve their approach to work by questioning their actions. Throughout my short time spent in Higher Education (HE) I have learned many new aspects of learning like different learning styles and models of reflection and this provides me with an opportunity to look back over these ideas and reflect. This will allow me to use these skills to my advantage and develop myself with a development plan to continue my educational understanding.

Students are expected to function effectively in a clinical setting by applying theoretical knowledge to practice (Stuart, 2013). Although, one of the biggest challenges for healthcare practitioners today is linking the academic and clinical aspects of the curriculum (Plack et,al 2008; Stuart, 2013). Kolb (2013) argued that the dynamic encounters and unique patients experience faced by students in the clinical setting usually do not follow the well-defined theoretical perspective being outlined in classroom. Reflective practice has been advocated as a means of articulating and developing knowledge gained in practice and also as a way of overcoming the difference between nursing theory and practice (Johns, 2009; Stuart, 2013). Reflection helps the student to observe, understand, learn and make sense of their daily experiences and also play a major role in student learning process (John, 2009). Schon (1992) stated that to succeed, the knowledge and skills from previous course work and clinical experiences must be built on by the student. Furthermore Plack et,al. (2008), affirm that to facilitate the process of reflection, the mentor is often required to identify, discuss and link specific learning instances to theories to enable students learn from their experiences. However Vinales (2015) argues that reflection is not spontaneous as it requires an active contribution on the part of the student. Therefore, constant reflection and discussion between the student nurses and their

I have connected the reflective research paper to objective # 1 because it made me examine my personal belief and attitude on gender equity issues. I did not realize that gender equity existed at the level that it does until researching the topic. Doing the research made me realize that the way we teach directly affects how children learn in every aspect.

Gender biases are a problem in many schools and gender equity has been used to help remove those biases. Equity refers to having equal expectations and treating students of different sexes and cultural backgrounds equally. Gender biases have been a problem in education for years. In the past boys and girls have had different expectations when it comes to education. Boys have generally been taught to take leadership roles and girls to take more passive roles. In recent years gender equity has helped remove gender biases from the classroom, giving boys and girls a more equal type of education.