6.3 Clinical Professional Practice Reflective Practice Activities
In the first week of your Clinical Professional Practice Placement, you will begin by sharing a bit about yourself with your clinical instructor. This is your opportunity to share what you would like your instructor to know about you! You can share as you wish to help the clinical instructor begin to understand who you are and your perception about clinical professional practice and working with clients in a healthcare setting. All information you share will be kept confidential.
Here are some of the questions you may want to begin to think about:
Let Me Get to Know YOU
- What are your perceptions about this clinical experience?
- What do you think you will learn from this experience?
- What strengths do you bring that will make this a beneficial learning experience?
- What areas do you need to improve upon? You may want to think back to your Lab classes. How
- will you do this?
- What goals do you want to achieve in this clinical professional practice placement
- Sometimes I wish I were more …
- I feel that my communication skills are …
- I would like the instructor to help me by …
- My other commitments this semester are (work, family, etc) …
- Other things I would like the instructor to know are …
Downloads
During your clinical professional practice placement, you may be asked to participate in reflective writing. You may be worried that writing your thoughts may be difficult, but you may be surprised that you do this more than you think! Reflective writing means that you will analyze an experience, something that happened during your clinical professional placement. You will take this experience and discuss how this experience has impacted you, how it made you feel, and how you will look forward and use your new knowledge next time. This process will help you to get your thoughts down on paper and meaningfully think about what happened. You will begin to reflect on a deeper level and think about certain events more thoroughly. The key to reflective writing is to make you analyze your thoughts, rather than just describing what happened. Answering the question, why?
It is important to build in time for reflection during your clinical professional practice placements, not only as it is part of your curriculum expectations, but to begin a practice in which you learn to take time to reflect throughout your day, your placement experience, and elicit this as a common practice.
You can learn more about reflective writing in the below video from Hull University:
Video: “Reflective Writing” by SkillsTeamHullUni [6:08] is licensed under the Standard YouTube License.Transcript and closed captions available on YouTube.
Clinical Professional Practice Reflective Practice Review Activity
During your clinical professional practice, you will frequently participate in Reflective Practice and Reflective Writing.
- What happened?
- How did I feel about the experience when it was happening?
- What meaning did this experience have for me?
- What do I need to improve on?
- What are my goals for next time?
- Give it a try. Can you think of an event or situation from your past in which you felt nervous?
You can download the following document and answer the questions with your thoughts and reflection.
Downloads
“Reflective Writing” in Reflective Practice Toolkit by the University of Cambridge is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence. Modifications: Used section What is reflective writing? reworded with additional content for PSW context; added exercises.
