When I first thought about reflecting and thinking critically, my immediate reaction was that I do that daily, regularly thinking about my feelings in situations and delving into why I feel certain ways. I also always strive to improve my skills and think about what I could have done better in situations, however I realised that I never think about what skills I require or what I need to practice in order to achieve this. This is an area I am aware I need to practice critical thought in. A way in which I am going to do this, is to write in the middle of a page what I need to improve on or could learn from, from this I will branch off at least five ideas on how I could improve this.

Having looked at the different reflective models available, I have decided that I like the idea of splitting a reflection into stages as seen in both Gibbs (1998) and Kolb (1944)’s Reflective Cycles. I feel this encourages us to consider all aspects when reflecting and not just focus on what went well and what did not go well. I feel it is very important to recognise your feelings and what else you gained from the experience as opposed to just looking at what can be improved on. I feel that these reflective models alone do not encourage me to critically think enough though, therefore I am going to continue to look at other styles of reflective model.

I feel like John’s Model for Structured Reflection (2006) is far too structured for me, I believe that I work better when randomly noting all of my thoughts and feelings about a particular situation and then following this up with questions about why I felt or behaved a certain way. I believe the rigidity of this model would limit my reflection. However, I will use a few of the questions from this model to prompt my reflection such as:

“What issues seem significant?”, “why did I respond as I did?” and “Did I act for the best?” I feel I get too focused on one particular thing that went wrong and struggle to get this thought out of my head and move on, I feel like this question will prompt me to ask myself why I am so affected by situations that occur.

To conclude, I think initially I am going to use Gibbs Reflective Cycle as my basic layout and headings for each section of my reflection but I am going to incorporate some prompting questions from John’s Model for Structured Reflection (2006) to encourage me to think critically and deeper. I am going to try this method for my first few reflections and then review in a month’s time to see if I feel this is working for me.