Professional development reflection logs

My curious nature means that I do a lot of annual PD: usually over 400 hours (of courses, conferences and reading). The professional organisation I belong to - CDANZ - requires me to log my professional development, and to reflect on each entry; and as the volume of transactions goes up, the quality of my reflection goes down. As I must reflect on each entry, I end up in an effortful chore space, where the reflection becomes an issue of form over substance.

Why 'must'? You see to remain a professional CDANZ member, when we renew our membership each year, we must log each PD item along with a reflection on each entry. I have a growing feeling that this reflection is effectively coerced. And perhaps because of this perceived coercion, I have become an increasingly reluctant participant. I feel as if I am simply hoop-jumping, and that my reflective capacity could be more gainfully employed elsewhere (like Batten, 2021; see below).

So why do we reflect? Well, reflective practice is where we take the "time to catch up with ourselves, to take stock, to make sense of what has happened, or to share other peoples' ideas on an experience" (Boud et al., 1985, p. 8). It is important: it gives us insight into our own actions to enable continuous learning (Schön, 1984); we explore our feelings and thinking to obtain illumination (Boud et al., 1985); we reflect by asking ourselves - and our clients - about our service effectiveness (Lyons, 1998); and we can use reflection as a tool to collect practice information (Farrell, 2015, p. 8).

But when we are required to undertake repeated reflection, it can become that chore that I mentioned earlier, effortful, with the potential issue of form over substance. Similar to my own experience, another practitioner reported their entries began to show a "progressively disinterested and flippant [attitude], clearly reflecting the growing resentment I had for the time required for the diary’s upkeep. Time which, I probably felt, could have been better invested in more entertaining endeavors" (Batten, 2021, p. 36). In such circumstances, reflection ceases being useful, or worse; worthless.

How else might membership organisations ensure members are getting 'enough' PD? Could members instead simply log the PD undertaken, then present a diary (Batten, 2021), a portfolio (Alsop, 2008), or an ongoing blog or vlog as evidence of PD? Regular entries could perhaps stand as a proxy for practice currency... particularly in the career field where we are less likely to inflict personal harm on a client than a surgeon, nurse, financial advisor, or barrister.

Another limitation is that we decide what PD we are interested in, and afterwards we self-reflect on quality and our own understanding. It is easy to see the inherent "potential bias in [this type of] self-assessment" (Drude et al., 2019, p. 449). If this were to be reliable, both the training and the reflection requires "humility [and...] alternative sources of input when [we...] assess [our...] own performance. Rather than relying solely on personal judgments, practitioners ought to discipline themselves by not only regularly evaluating their own professional practice and related attitudes but also inviting client/patient and peer review of the practitioner’s performance along the same dimensions" (p. 449).

The flaw arises because PD logs and reflection is a solo exercise. Yet it is in shared reflective practice that we often gain the most valuable insights (Broemmel et al., 2023). Discussing resources, books, practices, and and how to use them can give us wonderful lightbulb moments, as can sharing video of ourselves teaching classes (Broemmel et al., 2023). All of these can be undertaken either in a virtual discussion group, or face to face. Should organisations instead require that members participate in a PD discussion group?

That is an interesting idea.

Sam

References:

Alsop, A. (2008). Continuing professional development: A guide for therapists. John Wiley & Sons.

Batten, T. J. A. (2021). My Experience with Reflective Diaries in the Classroom. Explorations in Teacher Development, 27(3), 36-41. https://td.jalt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ETD-273.pdf#page=37.00e

Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1985). Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. Routledge.

Broemmel, A. D., Rigell, A., Jordan, J. J., & Rearden, K. T. (2023). ‘It was natural and real-life’: book clubs as professional development for preservice teachers. Teacher Development, 27(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2022.2137576

Drude, K. P., Maheu, M., & Hilty, D. M. (2019). Continuing professional development: Reflections on a lifelong learning process. Psychiatric Clinics, 42(3), 447-461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2019.05.002

Lyons, N. (1998). Chapter 7: Constructing narratives for understanding: Using portfolio interviews to scaffold teacher reflection. In N. Lyons (Ed.), With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the new teacher professionalism (pp. 103–119). Teachers College Press.

Schön, D. A. (1984). The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.