Community Impact And Practice - Research Paper Example

Reflective practice as a concept has been extensively used as applied to education for a considerable amount of time. Its success in education has seen it being adopted by health workers and other professionals over time. This has played a pivotal role in causing reflective practice to become widely regarded as being one of the key defining features marking competence. There are a number of different Reflective Practice models available and their use and applicability is seen to be largely varied from one organization or writer to the next one (Smith and Roberts, 2011).

The different models of reflective practice in use have caused what is understood to be reflective practice to be quite different within a number of different disciplines and intellectual traditions. It is now quite common to find a number of multiple and contradictory understandings of what exactly are reflective practice within the very same discipline. . In addition to the examination of the assumptions made in everyday practice, Engaging in reflective practice is also seen to generally involve causing the individual practitioner to become self-aware and resort to critically evaluating their very own responses to the practice situations.

The main objective of this is to attempt to recapture practice experiences and subsequently mull them over so as to be able to gain relevant new understandings and consequently be in a general position to improve future practice. 1.1.1 Importance of Reflective Practice Reflective practice is generally promoted as being a key element in the general delivery of effective services to the rather diverse populations of children, infants and families. Reflective practice has been touted as improving the engagement with clients as well as aiding practitioners in seeing a number of strengths and differences that they might normally not be able to perceive (cacenter-ecmh.org 2013). It helps individuals access the “how” of how things are supposed to be done and includes both the unspoken and spoken processes.

Reflective practice has been variously described as being the bridge from theory to practice (Hirst, 2005) as it offers processes that aid its various practitioners in taking concepts that they happen to believe and know and effectively apply them to the myriad real-life situations that are normally seen to be fraught with complexity. 1.1.2 Reflective Practice in the Enhancement of CPD and PDP The population changes seen to be affecting most of Europe and the United States that have mainly resulted in an increasingly aging workforce and ever decreasing pool of highly qualified professional talent is seen to be critically affecting the modern day workforce. It is