Introduction: Reflective capacity has been identified as an essential component of professional practice. Reflection often needs to be ‘taught’ to assist students to develop this habit for future practice. Health professional students are often provided with many opportunities for developing reflective capacity. However, taking students to a deeper more meaning experience of “critical reflection” requires explicit teaching and appropriate provision of feedback in order to support student learning (Aronson, 2011).
Participant Outcomes: Through round table discussion, participants will be introduced to examples of learning activities that use critical reflection as an assessment point as well as how it is used to develop synthesis of learning within practice based courses. Review of the literature on the role of providing feedback to student’s reflective writing will be addressed. The session will focus on introducing some approaches for guiding student reflective writing; techniques for developing grading rubrics as well be introduced to techniques for giving written feedback. Participants will critique several samples of reflective writing using a variety of approaches.
Practice Implications: Appreciation of the importance of formative feedback on student narrative writing will help participants to develop their own framework and rubric and “Critical reflection writing guide” to take back to their own academies. Conclusions: Reflection is an important part of practice. Developing reflective capacity skills requires some explicit teaching as well as faculty development in the area of providing feedback to the reflections to help learners scaffold their experiences into best practices and work toward solidifying their discipline specific knowledge, skills and attitudes.
References:
Aronson, L. (2010). Twelve Tips For Teaching Reflection At All Levels Of Medical Education. Medical Teacher, 33(3), 200-205.
Fook, J., & Gardner, F. (2007). Practising critical reflection a resource handbook. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Reidsema, C. & Mort, P. (2009). Assessing reflective writing: Analysis of reflective writing in an engineering design course. Journal of Academic Language & Learning. 3(2), A117-A129.
