Tools for reflective practice

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Tools for reflective practice

In this video you will see some of the ways in which training providers encourage the use of reflective practice and the benefits of using digital tools for this.

Reflective practice involves an evaluation of one’s own performance or work to bring about improvement. This helps learners to become self-regulated and independent learners.

Reflections can be achieved through self-review or peer-review and they can help apprentices:

  • understand the assessment criteria
  • act on other’s feedback or their own self-review to improve to meet those criteria
  • gain the confidence they need to perform well in their EPA.

Digital tools are particularly useful to enable learners to record both their performance or work and their reflections on it. Recording the reflection process has particular benefits as it creates a record of progress and a resource that can be returned to, or shared.

You may find the link to the Jisc ‘Student self-reflection’ useful in the See Also section. It is a resource which explains why reflective practice is important, what some of the issues are and how digital tools can help.

Here are some suggestions for how you can use digital tool to support your apprentices’ reflective practice:

Audio and video

Craig Carden at Salford City College told us how he encourages his apprentices to use audio to reflect on the day: what went well and what could be improved upon.

Zoe Hills at Basingstoke College of Technology described how apprentices can benefit from videoing their presentations to be able to reflect on their performance afterwards. Charlie Lecuyer, one of the apprentices at Basingstoke College, agreed that this was a good way for her to record her thoughts.

Sophie Ruddock at WhiteHat told us that she gets her apprentices to interview each other so that they can reflect together on what works and what doesn’t. These interviews can be recorded as a video or audio file so that individual learners can reflect on their performance later on.

Is this something your apprentices could do?

Blogs

Keeping a digital journal or a blog can be a useful tool for apprentices to write about their work. It can also help to include pictures, as Caroline Pharo from Basingstoke College told us:

“I think sometimes if you see your work after-the-fact in a picture, it can give you a really good reflective practice because sometimes when you’ve just finished it… you don’t see things as clearly. But if you can look back at it afterwards, you do see bits that you would improve should you do it next time”.

You have been adding to a course journal since you started this course – is this something your apprentices could do too?

Have a go:

Create an activity, using Learning Designer, to encourage your apprentices to self-reflect and become aware of the progress they have made. You can use the ‘Learning Design for Reflective Practice’ in the Downloads section to help you get started or you can create your own from scratch. Remember you can also use the guide in the Downloads section to help you use Learning Designer.

Link your design to this Padlet and post the url with a title that describes your specific context.

Have your say:

Have a look at other designs posted on the Padlet. In the Comments, discuss how you could make use of other participants’ designs for your learners.

Don’t forget to add interesting ideas to your course journal.

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