6.3 Clinical Professional Practice Reflective Practice Activities
In the first week of your Clinical Professional Practice Placement, you will have the opportunity to share a bit about yourself with your Clinical Instructor.
This is your opportunity to communicate what you would like your instructor to know about you—your background, interests, and how you feel about starting your Clinical Professional Practice Placement and working with clients in a healthcare setting. You are welcome to share as much or as little as you feel comfortable with. Everything you share will remain 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? (Reflect on your Lab classes)
- What goals do you want to achieve in this Clinical Professional Practice Placement?
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Photo by Klaske Rheubottom, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 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 …
During your Clinical Professional Practice Placement, you will participate in weekly reflective practice activities. While it might seem challenging at first, you likely reflect more often than you realize.
In your reflective practice activities, you will think about a situation/experience that occurred during your Clinical Professional Practice Placement and how the situation/experience affected you. You will then analyze this experience and your learning and reflect on how you will use this knowledge moving forward.
Reflective practice is not just about describing what happened—it is about meaningfully thinking about what happened and asking why it mattered.
Building time for reflection during your Clinical Professional Practice helps deepen your learning and is an important part of both your placement and your ongoing professional growth.
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.
Reflective Writing IS:
- Written in the first person.
- Analytical.
- Free flowing.
- Subjective.
- A tool to challenge assumptions.
- A time investment.
Reflective Writing IS NOT:
- Written in the third person.
- Descriptive.
- What you think you should write.
- Objective.
- A tool to ignore assumptions.
- A waste of time
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.
