Level 3 Certificate in Youth Work Practice Unit 8 A/505/9238 - 2 Credits Reflective Practice Assessment Tasks

Level 3 Certificate in Youth Work Practice
Unit 8
A/505/9238 – 2 Credits
Reflective Practice
Assessment Tasks
Learning Outcome 1 Understand the principles of reflective practice in youth work.
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1.1 Define reflective practice within a youth work setting.
Reflective practice within a youth work setting is the practice where an individual youth
in a workshop is given a conducive environment by workshop supervisors to explore personal
issues, identify judgment and work towards developing self-awareness (Johnston 2017).
Therefore it’s the process by which an individual learns from personal experience which occurs
in three stages, that is personal experience review, analysis and formation of a new experience.
According to Kolb reflective practice model, reflective practice goers in a cycle which begins
with concrete experiences, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization and finally active
experimentation. Reflective practice is therefore crucial for youth workers as it presents them
with the opportunity to learn from their own experience, which in turn help void reoccurrence of
mistakes.
Assessed by Signature Date
1.2 Explain the benefits of reflection in developing youth work practice.
As already mentioned above, reflection at youth work practice enables individual learners
to identify various issues that are most likely to affect their career development. Reflection also
helps the youths to become self-aware of their competencies and areas which need improvement.
Reflection is also critical as it allows youths to identify as well as respond to the emotional
impact of various traumatic events at work (Fook 2015).
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Assessed by Signature Date
1.3 Evaluate approaches to reflective practice and their potential strengths and
weaknesses.
4 lenses of critical reflection: this model was founded by D. Brookfield which stated that
reflection has four key perspectives which allow one to see a concept from various points of
view. These four perspectives include self-perspective, peers perspective, academic perspective,
and learner perspective (Knott and Scragg 2016).
Strengths: the key strength of this approach is that it can enable and individual to access
deep and inner thoughts.
Weaknesses: the weakness of this approach is that it focused on learners but not provide
room for adults such as teachers.
The approach of Max Van Manen: this type of reflection or approach provides for three
levels of reflection, which is an anticipatory reflection which talks of predetermined action,
interactive reflection which involves degree of removing oneself from the experience and finally
the third type three is recollected reflection which involves giving new insight on the past
experience.
Strengths: provides and individual with the opportunity to learn from past experience.
Weakness: this approach does not create room for adults’ involvement in the process.
Donald Alan Schön & Martin Rein's reflective approach: this framework focuses on
various problems that enable individuals to uncover and reframing their thoughts in an attempt to
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develop a more significant rationale (Zwozdiak-Myers 2018).
Strengths: This model is one of the most abstract methods among other approaches.
Weakness; this approach is constructive and only focuses on weaknesses giving little
chances to reflect on a positive experience.
Kenneth M. Zeichner & Daniel Patrick Liston approach:
This approach is composed of dimensions and describes five dimensions which include;
rapid reflection, repair, review, research together with Retheorise and Research.
Strength: this approach offers a great depth of reflections as well as immediate instinctive
responses.
Weakness; the weakness of this approach is that it has several dimensions that only focus
only on the adults (Knott and Scragg 2016).
Work debriefs: these are meetings help by team members to reflect upon what they have
not done well and to come up with a course of action.
Strength: the key strength of debrief is that it is the most simple way in which team
members identify their own weakness correct them and identify opportunities
Weakness; debriefs are time consuming and in some occasions may lead to blames and
deteriorating morale within the team.
Meetings: meetings is another means use by youths in a youth work environment to
reflect on what the team has done in the past and what current as well as deduce a way forward.
Strength: work meetings present a team with the ability to focus on the future while
learning from the past as well as the current moments.
Weakness: work meetings eat up a lot of time which otherwise could have been invested
in production.
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