As a part of every nursing clinical, students must complete a reflective journal either each day or at the end of their week. At one college where I worked, the requirement was for students to follow Gibb’s Reflective Cycle for their weekly assignment. Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle is a structured model that helps guide the process of reflection through six stages. It begins with a description of what happened, followed by an exploration of your feelings during the experience. Next, you evaluate what was good or bad about the situation, then analyze why things happened the way they did. After that, you draw a conclusion about what you learned and consider what you could have done differently. Finally, you create an action plan for how you would handle a similar situation in the future. For our program, the student also had to link their reflection to one of the standards of practice of their chosen profession. Students could easily answer several of the questions, but often they struggled with key part, the reflection, looking back and wondering about different response and outcomes. Which is completely understandable, as this was a skill the program was trying to develop.
My approach to this is assignment is to let the students know that they will always pass this requirement. Taking the worry away of what kind of grade they would be getting, I believe benefits the student as they can focus on their own voice instead of meeting the mark. I hope to encourage honest thoughtfulness and answers from my students. I also let them know that this assignment is a conversation between just the two of us. Also, once they submit their journal, the assignment is not necessarily complete as I ask them questions to further encourage them to reflect on what they are writing about and feeling. This is a part of reflection at its core. It is not a one and done. You may not have the opportunity to repeat an experience again and try a new angle or tool, you just continue to think about. Our initial reflections may not offer a complete or well-rounded understanding, as they are often clouded by personal bias. Engaging with others through conversation and shared experiences can expand our perspective. Our community allows us to see beyond ourselves. Just like the saying, there is always someone who is better at you (in relation to a skill), there is usually someone who has gone through the same experience you have. We often think of ourselves in isolation, that” No one else has felt this”. Through dialogue, our reflection can become richer, more meaningful, and ultimately more transformative.
To help the students learn the art of reflective practice, I will make half the assigned journals pertain to a broad topic, like loss, aging, change, identifying situations that their patients might be going through to similar experiences they may have had in their lives. The first assignment of each clinical is to talk about being new. With their first week under their belt, I ask them to reflect on another time they were new to something in their life and compare it their current experience. I ask them to look at the tools and resources they used in that previous situation and in their action plan, identify what they did before that could potentially help them navigate their new experience.
I feel I have had fairly good success with my students, though I have done zero research to support that statement. This may be something that I can look forward to in my next steps, including a component so that I can evaluate students’ outcomes and feelings about the use of reflective practice. Most of my students seem happy to have had me as an instructor, although I do recall one student, I struggled with teaching the concept of reflection. I thought I was bringing it down to the bare bones of comparing an apple to an orange, and even that was a difficult effort for her. In the end, she was not successful in her clinical with her inability to reflect on her own actions with patients, staff, and family members. Those are the ones that you remember the most, the students that did not make it, and as I reflect, maybe this student is one of the reasons why I have made this such an important part of my learning journey. To even have just one person fail under you is devastating and I know that we both put allot of work in trying to make her successful.