A professional knowledge base for collaborative reflection education: a qualitative description of teacher goals and strategies

Abstract

Introduction For several decades, educational experts have promoted reflection as essential to professional development. In the medical setting, collaborative reflection has gained significant importance across the curriculum. Collaborative reflection has a unique edge over individual reflection, but many medical teachers find facilitating group reflection sessions challenging and there is little documentation about the didactics of teaching in such collaborative reflection settings. To address this knowledge gap, we aim to capture the professional knowledge base for facilitating collaborative reflection by analyzing the formal and perceived goals and strategies of this practice. Methods The professional knowledge base consists of formal curricular materials as well as individual teacher expertise. Using Template Analysis, we analyzed the goals and strategies of collaborative reflection reported in institutional training documents and video-stimulated interviews with individual teachers across all Dutch general practitioner training institutes. Results The analysis resulted in a highly diverse overview of educational goals for residents during the sessions, teacher goals that contribute to those educational goals, and a myriad of situation-specific teacher strategies to accomplish both types of goals. Teachers reported that the main educational goal was for residents to learn and develop and that the teachers’ main goal was to facilitate learning and development by ensuring everyone’s participation in reflection. Key teacher strategies to that end were to manage participation, to ensure a safe learning environment, and to create conditions for learning. Discussion The variety of strategies and goals that constitute the professional knowledge base for facilitating collaborative reflection in postgraduate medical education shows how diverse and situation-dependent such facilitation can be. Our analysis identifies a repertoire of tools that both novice and experienced teachers can use to develop their professional skill in facilitating collaborative reflection.

Mind The Gap: A Philosophical Analysis of Reflection’s Many Benefits

“…Our second example comes from a study on weekly group reflection sessions in the Dutch GP specialty training. 40,41 Mario Veen and Anne de la Croix studied how participants themselves make experiences "shared" and "reflectable." One case involves registrar Ilone, who told the group how her supervisor criticized "the way she says her name when she answers the phone, which upset her."…”

“…42,60 Practically, we take (reflective) discussion groups as a positive example, for instance the Exchange of Experience (EoE) rounds in the Dutch GP specialty training. [40][41][42] Once a week, a small group of GP registrars under supervision of two teachers come together to discuss their clinical experiences in an open, dialogic environment. Group discussions entice immediate exchanges of diverse perspectives between the individual and communal sense (as represented by other individuals) about concrete experiences.…”

“…Group discussions entice immediate exchanges of diverse perspectives between the individual and communal sense (as represented by other individuals) about concrete experiences. [40][41][42] Such shared meaning making "promotes the formation of professional identities. " 42(p876) Second, when it comes to using reflection for one's professional identity, we recommend using formal guidelines and models for reflection as sources of inspiration to reflect, and not as normative models that dictate how practitioners should reflect.…”

When and how teachers intervene in group discussions on experiences from practice in postgraduate medical education: an interactional analysis

“…Highly detailed interactional analyses like those reported in this article are supplementary to for example observational approaches like video reflexive ethnography, which are limited with regards to describing exactly how social actions interrelate and construct the interactional context as the interaction unfolds. Such approaches, however, could be beneficial for gleaning teacher interpretations of their own behavior (see for an example in the context of group discussion: van Braak et al ( 2022 ).…”

‘Oh yes, that is also reflection’—Using discursive psychology to describe how GP registrars construct reflection

“…At the beginning of each training day at the university, a fixed group of approximately 10-12 registrars come together with two teachers for 90-min 'Exchange of Experiences' sessions, in which they discuss experiences from practice. 31,[33][34][35] At the university, registrars also take part in 'supervision sessions' that emphasise reflection on one's personhood and professionalism, and registrars are taught additional group reflection techniques. Furthermore, they also share experiences with their supervisor during weekly meetings at the residency.…”