A reflective practice

By Karyn Santl

As a reflective practitioner, I use the end of the calendar year as a time to reflect on the past and look forward to upcoming opportunities. I use this time to look at my cumulative efforts over the past twelve months to inform the direction I want the next year to take. My practice of reflecting has evolved over the years. I have learned that reflection is a powerful tool that we use when working with youth, but it can be used for program improvement and professional development as well.  

I started my career as a staff person working directly with youth, so the base of my reflective practice is the 4-H Experiential Learning Model.  I summarize this model as:

• Do or have an experience.
• Reflect and share about the experience. 
• Apply learnings from this experience to an experience in the future.  

Reflection is a key strategy in youth work that helps young people make meaning from experiences. In our youth organization (4-H) staff and volunteers use reflection as a way to check in with young people about how they are feeling and build connections. It is used during and after projects or planning to help young people consider how things went and how they would do things differently in the future. 

Reflection is a powerful tool -- not just for working with youth, but for youth workers and their supervisors. The article, Youth Work Supervision: Supporting Practice through Reflection states that when a supervisor models reflection and a youth worker experiences the process, the staff is better equipped to provide higher quality opportunities for youth. The process of reflection shifts power from the supervisor to the youth workers who then direct their own learning and growth. Supervisors can support a reflective practice by being staff centered and using divergent questions to engage staff in their thoughts and possibilities. This article provided six strategies for supervisors to implement reflection with staff:  

1. Create and dedicate time to the process. 
2. Be reliable, trustworthy and genuine.
3. Listen and don’t focus on creating or providing the answers. 
4. Focus on coaching for staff to create their own solutions and provide support accordingly. 
5. Don’t judge ideas, encourage staff to be critical thinkers in their own right. 
6. Avoid one right answer, encourage many possibilities of action.

As I reflected on this blog post, I feel I am doing most of this with the staff I work with. I know I can be better at it and more intentional about it in practice. In the future, I am going to apply my learning by not going into problem-solving mode right away, but focus on coaching staff to create their own solutions. So as I move into the new year, this will become a goal of mine.  

Because I want to be more intentional about reflecting on my work, I put two hours on my calendar on the last Friday of the month. I use this time to look back on my calendar and task lists and write about what I have done. I will write about the role I had in a project and where the project is at in the planning or implementation stage. I will write a reflection on what went well with a project, something I observed, or data from program evaluations. This also helps me apply learning from my reflection as I plan out the next month’s work. Setting aside time at the end of the month helps me keep up in being a reflective practitioner.  

Reflective practice parallels what a good youth worker does with youth. What is one reflective practice you have?

-- Karyn Santl, Extension educator

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