Thing 5 – Reflection, Reflection, Reflection

Image Credit:  James J. Jenkins on Flickr.

I am not, as most people who know me would probably agree, a particularly reflective person. I’m very impulsive, and tend not to labour over things. Reflective practice does not come easily to me. It is something that I do need to force myself to consider rather than a regular occurrence in my day to day life.

During the course of my Library degree at Sheffield, my lecturers were very keen on the idea of Reflective Practice, and it was a core aspect of many of my modules – with most demanding some sort of assessed or un-assessed reflection on various aspects of the course. Dutifully I complied, and to my astonishment I actually found it really rewarding, and it helped me determine why I was doing things, and what I could improve on or what interested me. In essence, reflective practice helped me determine a path forward in order to develop my skills (and also on occasion, rein in my strong personality!) so that I created a more purposeful attitude to my working relationships, behaviour and my academic progress.

I don’t really hold store with academic models on reflective practice, so I don’t really have a guide to how I reflect on my experiences. My reflections tend to be on more negative experiences, e.g. where I perhaps felt out of my depth, or an instance that troubled me in some way. I find it harder to reflect on positive experiences, as I find it harder to pinpoint why something was good. Negative experiences are easier to try to determine a way forward – for instance, what I could have done differently, or why something went wrong.

I do find reflective practice helpful, but it is not something that I do as a matter of course. I need to change this behaviour.


*By the way, if you’re wondering what has happened to Thing 4 – I haven’t done it. I’ve skipped right past it and onto more interesting topics. Unfortunately (and I did try), I can’t muster up the enthusiasm to wax lyrical on RSS feeds. Although, if you get the opportunity, do try If This, Then That, which I am using for a multiple of things. I have it set up to automatically add anyone who tweets on the #cpd23 hashtag to a special CPD23 twitter list, I use it to text me weather updates, and give me a comprehensive one page list of a core group of friends’ social networking updates.

It’s great, try it! The wonderful @meimaimaggio on Twitter gave me my invite, for which I am eternally grateful. I have three invites if anyone would like one.