Exploring the outcomes of a reflective teaching strategy with students: A feasibility study

Abstract

Purpose: Reflection can be a valuable learning strategy for connecting theory with practice and illuminating insights and understandings from complex or messy experiences. This learning is critical for educators and health professionals who work or teach students in complex contexts. In anticipation of their future needs, speech-language pathology students, like many health profession students in Australia, are expected to demonstrate the ability to reflect on their practice as part of their professional practice or clinical education. It is challenging to support educators to facilitate reflection and students to learn when, why, and how to reflect for personally and professionally meaningful outcomes given the diversity in understandings and capabilities present in the literature. The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of an evidence-based reflection intervention to clarify and support student reflective practice. Method: A convergent mixed methods design captured quantitative and qualitative results from 16 participants for a better understanding of the feasibility of a reflection intervention. Result: The diversity in the reflection literature also appears to be present in students’ reflection approaches. This diversity can encourage student engagement and ownership of reflecting when considered within a rich learning environment. Conclusion: Findings are discussed for timely, intellectually and emotionally safe reflection interventions that develop students’ reflective inquiry in the real-world.