Learning outcomes

After this chapter you will be able to:

• 1 ask ‘smart questions’;

• 2 find a ‘critical friend’ who can offer external perspectives to extend personal reflective capacity;

• 3 have an overview on reflective frameworks, start using some of them and ‘handcraft’ new, more effective and tailor-made tools;

• 4 choose the most appropriate of the many different strategies for reflective writing according to goal and context;

• 5 use concise reflective writing as an essential, effective and practicable strategy even when working conditions make it hard to find time for structured reflection;

• 6 appreciate and start using different forms of metaphors, visual or written, in order to gain a holistic and deeper understanding of significant events so as to better nurture reflective practice.

Introduction

The last two chapters of this book are focused on tools and strategies that are available in order to improve the quality of reflection and reflective practice. This chapter presents some techniques and strategies helpful at an individual level (or in a dyadic situation) and the final chapter presents tools to be used in cooperation with other people or the entire organisation where the social workers are employed.

The quantity of tools and strategies available in literature is really huge. The ones presented here have been selected with a special focus on mistakes and failures in social work and according to their capacity to improve professional practice.

The role of questions is vital in any process of reflection. When people reflect they are doing nothing but asking questions of themselves. Choosing the appropriate questions is of great importance to orientate the eyes of the mind in the most fruitful direction and consequently bring the person's attention to some selected and crucial aspects of the event under scrutiny.

As the Nobel Prize winner for literature Naguib Mahfouz is reported to have said, ‘you can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions’ (Gelb, 1996, p 96). So, since the ‘right’ questions are so important for learning from experience as well, and it is not easy to formulate them, there are a lot of frameworks developed with the purpose of making reflective practitioners ‘wiser’, that is to say, to enhance and deepen their reflection.