Reflection as an Educational Strategy in Nursing Professional Development

Abstract

Reflection is a critical component of professional nursing practice and a strategy for learning through practice. This integrative review synthesizes the literature addressing the use of reflection as an educational strategy and reports outcomes from the use of reflective strategies. Reflection education is primarily nested in programs to meet specific clinical goals, structured with group facilitation. Findings suggest that reflective strategies stimulate learning in practice, enhance readiness to apply new knowledge, and promote practice change.

Reflective Practice in Healthcare Education: An Umbrella Review

“…Examples include a mandatory training programme that included a reflective strategy to enhance healthcare providers' ability to meet patients' mental health needs [61] or a work-based initiative that included reflective diaries to enhance therapeutic communication with service users in acute mental health settings [62]. Those authors also described the process of teaching nurses how to reflect to promote reflective practice, insight and reflective thinking; how to promote reflective practice through groupguided reflection; how to gain deeper levels of reflection on clinical practice; and how to explore reflective journaling [31]. Reflective journaling and reflective writing have also been frequent topics of enquiry in other reviews.…”

“…This categorisation can be combined with the themes described in the previous paragraph by the same authors [31], and various reflection strategies can be produced. For instance, when reflection is nested into multifaceted educational programmes, information that is relevant to the clinical practice setting and educational goals of the project are presented to participants and paired with a reflective educational strategy, stimulating tacit knowledge development and experiential learning.…”

Exploring whether (and how) self-reflection can improve practice as a teacher educator

“…Although reflection is very much linked with healthcare education already (Buckley et al 2009;Chaffey et al 2012;Chen and Forbes 2014;Crowe and O'Malley 2006;Epp 2008;Fragkos 2016;Jayatilleke and Mackie 2013;Kuiper and Pesut 2004;Lethbridge et al 2011;Mann et al 2009;McGillivray et al 2015;Miraglia and Asselin 2015;Ng et al 2015;Nguyen et al 2014;Norrie et al 2012;Prasko et al 2012;Rushmer et al 2004;Tsingos et al 2015a;Tsingos et al 2015b;Van Roy et al 2015;Williams 2001), I will try to focus on self-reflection which will improve personal practice as a teacher educator.…”

“…Summative reflective technique methods include portfolios (paper or electronic), reflective diaries/autobiographical stories (Buckley et al 2009;Miraglia and Asselin 2015). Important aspects of this techniques usually involve reflecting on daily practice or reflecting on goal oriented tasks.…”

The impact of deliberate reflection with WISE-MDTM modules on critical thinking of nurse practitioner students: A prospective, randomized controlled pilot study

“…The process for deliberate reflection was introduced for several reasons: 1) deliberate reflection implies making the reflective process overt to enhance learning, [11,12] 2) deliberate reflection, unlike the similar metacognitive strategy of self-explanation, is not restricted to inferences and clarifying, justifying or monitoring behavior, [13,14] 3) deliberate reflection focuses on integrating previous experiences with current experience, applying strategic knowledge about self and learning (including awareness of affective components such as confidence), [13,14] and, incorporating mental representation (selective encoding, combination and comparison), [15][16][17] 4) deliberate reflection has important temporal features of reflection to consider before, during and after action, and 5) deliberate reflection uses a think-aloud or verbal-report strategy used in debriefing and other thought-process research strategies. [7] The process of making reflective thinking overt (the first reason) is suggested by using cognitive forcing strategies to de-bias and prevent diagnostic errors.…”