Oral Health | Clinical and Risk Asessment | Reflective practice

Reflective practice
Session overview
Description
This session describes the principles and techniques of reflective practice, and how to incorporate them into everyday primary or secondary care clinical practice.

Learning objectives
By the end of this session you will be able to:

• describe the key principles behind reflection and experiential learning
• discuss how these principles can be incorporated into Continuing Professional Development (CPD), learning situations and clinical practice
• identify situations where this approach to learning could be applied
• list the drivers required to proceed the cyclical process of experiential learning
• evaluate where improvements in practice and learning have occurred

Prerequisites
Before commencing this session you should:

• be familiar with professional development portfolios and reflective diaries

Reflection in action is defined by Schön as the ability of professionals to:

"...think what they are doing while they are doing it, and apply previous experience to new situations."

Donald Alan Schön trained as a philosopher, but it was his concern with the development of reflective practice and learning systems within organisations and communities for which he is remembered.

The concept was introduced in his book The Reflective Practitioner in 1983 [1](read details regarding the reference).

This is the crux of modern reflective practice as we strive to be patient centred, evidence based and clinically effective all at the same time!