Critical reflection often begins as just a lot of profound learning. With a disorientating dilemma. A disorientating dilemma occurs, when you have an experience that doesn't fit your expectations. Something about it may not make sense to you. It stretches you beyond your comfort zone. Furthermore, you realize that you need to make a change in order to resolve it disorientating dilemmas, take many forms.

It could be losing a job getting a promotion, new technology at work, a diagnosis of illness, a new baby, living through historical event, the list is endless. The experience can seem good or bad to you, it doesn't matter. The operative factor is somehow it rocks your world, even if just a little and two resolve it you need to adjust and or grow. Mistakes are a common type of disorientating dilemma. It was my tendency to make mistakes and get upset about it that brought the value of critical reflection home to me. When I made a mistake, I felt shame and guilt, especially if my blender affected someone else.

My negative self talk kicked in with stuff like And you call yourself a nurse, mother, automobile driver, business owner, etc. You fill in the blanks for yourself. I used to think that the more pain I felt, the more I would learn. Well guess what? Learning doesn't work that way. We learn better when we are relaxed and open, not stressed and uncomfortable.

We are more receptive when our minds are clear, not cluttered with negative self talk. critical reflection helps us break out of that cycle. In his book, black box thinking Matthew sighs It uses the airline industry as an example of how corporations can embrace mistakes rather than despise hide or deny them. Each plane is fitted with a blackbox recorder that is examined after a major incident to figure out what went wrong. Cya claims that this is the reason why air travel is now one of the safest modes of transportation around and states that we progress faster when we face up to failure and learn from it. His conclusion is that to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure as an important part of development and safety quality improvement.

Imagine working in an organization that sees failure in this way. And maybe you already do. You can try new things knowing that you will be appreciated and supported even if it doesn't work out. You freely discussed mistakes with coworkers and management, benefiting from everyone's constructive feedback as they benefit in turn from your heart. One wisdom. Instead of trying to save face cover up, make excuses or allocate blame.

Your time or energy is spent improving skills and gaining insights. The same goes for your personal life. critical reflection fits well with this approach. So let's look at the reflection part first. JOHN Dewey, a renowned educator in the early 19th century once said, We don't learn from experience we learn from reflecting on experience. Let's take this apart a bit.

Here are some definitions of reflection. Consideration of some subject matter, idea or purpose, a fixing of the thoughts on something careful consideration. serious thought, contemplation a calm lengthy intent consideration doesn't it? Relax you just to hear words like consideration, thought calm and contemplation. This is a far cry from the tension we often feel in response to mistakes. Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher taught that there was a strong connection between reflection and learning.

Firstly, he said, learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection infuses meaning into learning, partly because it helps anchor it and experience. If we have no experience to reflect on it's harder to learn. For example, someone tells you not to eat the green apples because they are unripe and will make you sick. You need to reflect on your experience with apples, the color green ripeness and being sick to truly grasp the implications and connect the information appropriately with your life knowledge. Confucius went on to say, reflection without learning is dangerous.

That's quite a statement. What did he mean by it? One interpretation is that if we just reflect, but do not learn from experience, we can end up spinning our wheels. For example, we reflect on a compliment and conclude that we are wonderful and have arrived and don't have to work on ourselves anymore. This leads to complacency. Instead of examining what we did well and trying to do more of it, we just rest on our laurels.

Conversely, if we reflect on a mistake and simply conclude that we are a failure, and there's no use trying, we also get nowhere. It's human to want to be in our comfort zone. However, psychologist Daniel Gilbert states that human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished and as philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, Well, people wish to be settled only as far as they're unsettled Is there any hope for them? If we want to learn and grow, we need to consciously work at it. Furthermore, reflecting on a mistake with no intention to learn from it can degenerate into negative self talk, or what authors Blackburn and Apple describe as rumination in their book the telomere effect. They say, reflection is the natural, curious introspective or philosophical analysis about why things happen a certain way.

Reflection can cause you some healthy discomfort, especially if you're thinking about something you wish you hadn't done, but rumination makes you feel awful. You can't stop yourself even if you try and it doesn't lead to a solution only to more ruminating negative self talk is not only damaging to our self esteem in general well being, it doesn't help us learn. Instead, our extreme discomfort may cause us to simply avoid situations, actions or persons that we associate with it. Once again, we end up trying to stay in our comfort zone, instead of meeting challenges head on. This can severely limit our relationships, careers and general enjoyment of life. So the takeaway from all this is that reflection and learning go hand in hand.

Together, they give us we could say the full picture. To examine the contribution of the critical element of the process. Let's look at some definitions of critical something that is crucial judged analyzed at a turning point or on the verge of a crisis using or involving careful judgment. About the good and bad parts of something involving skill judgment as to truth, merit, etc. You can see that the word critical implies some form of judgment, even criticism. However, the reflection part moderates these elements.

Joining the words critical and reflection together takes each concept to another level, the critical part is softened, and the reflection part is sharpened. Unlike its cousin critical thinking critical reflection is not so much about scrutinizing evidence to determine the accuracy and application of something. It is a more holistic practice a deeper process of making meaning from experience. It leads us closer to the richness at the core of an issue. It helps us to take the straw of an experience and transform it you could say spin it into gold According to the scholarly literature on critical reflection, we can critically reflect inaction on action and for action. Reflection in action is about thinking on your feet, you assess risks, decide what to do, and act in the moment while things are happening.

For a variety of reasons, it is not always possible to do this well. A situation may be overwhelming, too fast paced, or have distracting emotional undertones. So while reflection inaction is a great practice, our focus here is on the other two types of reflection on action and for action. reflection on action takes place after the fact. It helps us reap the benefits of hindsight, you can take your time removed from the heat of the moment to do some in depth thinking. you analyze or interpret and experienced by thinking, discussing or writing about it.

You can identify challenge areas and learning needs and create A plan and that is the reflection for action part. The insights you gain in this way may help you to reflect better inaction next time the opportunity arises. Here we have discussed what critical reflection is and what it can do for us, how it can help us learn from our mistakes and avoid stumbling blocks such as complacency and rumination. We have taken apart the terminology and looked at the three types of critical reflection. In the next section you will learn about and how to use a simple critical reflection model.