Reflective Practice Reflection

Author has discussed the background of reflective practice, its importance in health care profession and his own experience of reflective practice by adopting it as one of the components of spiral curriculum at School of Medicine, Leeds University. He has discussed importance and need of reflective practice for students and clinicians, and suggests ways of how reflective practice can be developed in the future doctors at the beginning of undergraduate program.

Author gives an overview of reflection in health care education and discusses that it has recently been incorporated in structured medical teaching for its importance for professional development of doctors. Medical students and doctors have been doing reflection like all other human beings do but in

Emotional intelligence strand which is based on Goleman’s (2001) conceptual framework where feelings and emotions are considered an integral part of reflective process. Learners are first introduced to four competencies in emotional intelligence in that order: awareness of own emotions, management of own emotions, awareness of others’ emotions and management of others’ emotions (Jordan & Lawrence 2009). A task is then given to the learners in first year where they reflect on their perceptions about their own emotional intelligence and how to address their strength and weaknesses. Learners later in the year assess themselves that whether or not they have improved on the emotional intelligence or not. Author has suggested that this task can be converted into goal oriented task and students can be encouraged to build on their emotional intelligence according to their current level. Author however did not discuss if this process of building on emotional intelligence is continued throughout the following years of undergrad education or not. In my opinion, adult learners work best when the relevancy of the task is evident to them hence this process should be continued in subsequent years and clinical