On Reflection: The Process of Reason

Reason, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary can be defined as follows:

• A cause, explanation or justification for an action or event
• Good or obvious cause to do something
• A premise or an argument in support of a belief, especially a minor premise when given after a conclusion.
• The power of the mind to think, understand and form judgements logically.  

Reason is very much at the heart of reflection and the process of reflective practice :

Recognise or Recall experience - focus or pay attention during or after
Explore Experience feelings and understanding
Assess the level of understanding and lack of understanding
State the central theme or the gut feeling of the experience
Open up to alternatives, a different perspective, empathise, stand in someone else's shoes
Now what? What do you do with it - what can be learned and how is it applied? What conclusions have you come to? What is the next action? (based on Kolb Learning Cycle, 1975)

Recognise/Recall: In the experience I recall standing at the gate with four colleagues, after 20+ children had left the centre. A man stopped his bike outside and read a notice nearby saying 'God is Love' and asks in an accusatory tone, 'Ah but does God love Bob?' and points to himself, the aforementioned Bob. I recognised this was an experience I needed to pay attention to in it and after.

Explore Experience: I felt put on the spot, in front of colleagues. I felt his attack and frustration with life erupting in the words 'does God love Bob?' I was worried that if I didn't say something that it would put someone else on the spot and that if I said the wrong thing it would escalate.

Assess: I didn't know what was wrong with Bob and why he felt that he hadn't got a fair deal or did not feel valued, but I did know his manner was showing these feelings and wanting to be heard.

State: The central theme was that where Bob should get unconditional positive regard, he wasn't and was either seeking it elsewhere or railing against the forces which made it so. My gut feeling told me he was feeling undervalued and unloved.

Open up: I imagined what its like to feel like that and what would make me feel better. Someone listening, humour and feeling cared about..and unconditional positive regard.

Now What? So on reflection when this stranger stopped on his bike and asked:

'Ah but does God love Bob?'

I answered with a smile:

'Everybody loves Bob!'

And Bob smiled with delight, gave an appreciative chuckle and got on his bike to the sound of conspiratorial laughter and calls and waves goodbye.

And then I once more start the process after the event has ended and recall the feelings of pleasure and sense of achievement, having as the corny saying goes, 'turned a frown upside down' and continue the rest of the REASON process all over again, having reflected in action,  I then reflect on action (Schon, 1983).

Read More on Reflective Practice: On Supervision: Professional Supervision

Kolb, D.A. & Fry, R. (1975) Towards an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning in Cooper, C.L. (Ed) Theories of Group Processes, John Wiley & Sons

Kolb D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall

Schon, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner,  New York,  Basic Books

On Reflection: Professional Supervision

Attending a workshop in professional supervision today I was reminded of why I write this blog as part of my reflective practice and the need we all have to reflect in and on action as Schon (1983) outlines below:

‘Reflection in action …as the experience is happening…

Reflection on action is done later and entails looking at why certain actions were taken…’

Kolb’s Learning Cycle or ‘circle of experience’ (1975) shows how this reflection works:

When it comes to reflection in a professional capacity there are many and varied ways to learn. I provide 1:1 line-management supervision and non-line-management supervision and I learn as much in the interactions the supervisees. I learn from reflection whether it is filling in an evaluation form or in discussion in group evaluations after sessions. I learn from every conversation I have ,as well as every thought process before, during and after every action, in my individual reflection in and on action.

Whether using  a Learning Diary or a blog such as this, I use writing to explore feelings and experiences to come to new understandings. My reflective practice is a  journey, as Senge (1990) would put it,  living in a ‘continual learning mode’ where people never ’arrive’. 

In the process of professional supervision the two people in the relationship are pilgrims together on a pilgrimage, learning together.

‘The pilgrim has the ability (and joy) of assisting others in their reflection process people who in another situation could be doing that for us. Pilgrimage implies seeing someone as a fellow traveler, where discussion and reflection take place as par of the over all journey. In supervisory terms, this means acknowledging the value of what both the supervisee and supervisor bring to the supervisory journey’ (Green 2002)

The pilgrimage we are on to greater understanding is made easier by the company of fellow travellers. They can provide direction. They can help remove barriers on the path. They can motivate or encourage when the journey seems long. And sometimes they only need to be there to make us realise that we are not alone. That we are all pilgrims travelling together on the pilgrimage of life-long-learning.

Green, D. (2002) The Process of Supervision, The Development of Supervision as an Educational Process, Unit 1: Supervision Studies Handbook, YMCA George Williams College

Kolb, D.A. & Fry, R. (1975) Towards an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning in Cooper, C.L. (Ed) Theories of Group Processes, John Wiley & Sons

Kolb D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall

Schon, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner,  New York,  Basic Books

Senge, P. M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, New York, Doubleday

The Action-cake, Skipping to the Chase and Kolb

Walking past two girls emptying out onto the street from a door in a building, I was struck by their lack of awareness of the rest of the world as they began to skip past me into the square. As I headed in the opposite direction, I looked around me and finding no one in the vicinity, I skipped a few steps, to try it out, somewhat delightedly, but self-aware as if I would be caught out any moment. It had been a long time since I had skipped along a street, and even longer since I had done it without a self consciousness.

When I work with children and young people I see the mixture of levels of self-consciousness which arises with age. Some young children are fearless and can disappear into their own worlds not caring about the consequences. Some older children start to feel awkward, judged, aware, observed and escape into their own worlds on-line or on-phone for safety and security. Other older young people are confident one minute and not the next and can switch at will, or just have no choice but to change as their feelings change.

There are times when I work with children and young people when I am trying to one minute encourage someone out of their shell, the next trying to provide boundaries or opportunities for practicing and reinforcing positive and appropriate behaviour. I feel like I am forever adjusting thermostats. Fires are burning, snow is on the ground and everything changes with the wind.

Christmas parties at our centre have had musical statues at the end. The tone has ranged from self conscious shifting from one foot to the other to unabashed frenzies of joyous explosions of dancing.

We are controlled so much by society's expectations of appropriateness. The thermostat isn't enough...We also need other control measures like a measurement of the physical space it takes up or timing. We weigh out the ingredients for our action-cake and put it in the oven at the correct temperature for the cake and its size and watch the clock to see its cooked and when we take it out cool it for eating.

Action-cake: Recipe

1. Weigh up whats needed for an end result

2. Put together the verbal and non-verbal ingredients needed to achieve desired outcome

3. Gauge the temperature of the atmosphere ...adjust setting for optimum rising to the occasion.

4. Put into action.

5. Check on progress

6. When done remove from situation

7. Check if met standards

8. Cool down and check end result

9. Enjoy having your cake and eating it or humble-pie

10. Adjust recipe for future endeavours

Or

Throw something together not worrying how it's going to turn out...just enjoying the process...living in the moment by moment unwritten recipe of life.

Either way it's Kolbs cycle and reflective practice in action...but some is more conscious or self-and-others-aware than the other.

Sometimes you make the conscious decision to skip and other times you just skip !

The Baba Effect

The imagination is the fertile ground on which sprouts the flowers and beanstalks of our great ideas.It can be hazardous and joyful in our dreams. It can be inhibiting and liberating in our day time routines. It can be enthralling and enriching in our creative lives.

Where do the ideas come from? What prompts such ideas as the following?

1 A dream:

Two seals appear in a dream, followed by two wolves guarding them.

2. A poem:

There are kippers in the sky today
And treacle in the sea
And lemons growing on the moon
And magpies for our tea
And when you find a starfish
In your porridge, in your jam
You must return it to the sky
And say "That's what I am".

 3. A googled word 'Baba':

The last, I know the answer to and the answer  may even explain all three.

 I sat at my laptop testing the Internet by randomly googling a word. I typed   'Baba'. My colleague and I wondered why. I immediately made the only association I could which was with Babar the elephant, which I had watched as a child. Consequently I added the letter 'r'. The internet,  I found was working and we continued to chat until my colleague became distracted and said 'Baba' pointing to an old wooden Turkish delight box (now housing loom bands) which had been sitting to the side of my desk for the previous few weeks. I hadn't noticed and probably wouldn't have, had it not been for my colleague, the words written after the larger words' Turkish Delight' , the less distinct words -  'Hazer Baba'.

Our ideas are not in our heads. They are just visitors being transported and given a tour of our brains while originating in the native land of real life and sometimes returning to reality to make a little more sense of it if we spot the clues. The subconscious is like the subplot to the main story of our lives...eventually we will know where it is going, but not until we are there and can make sense of it. As 'possible's slow fuse is lit by the imagination' (Emily Dickenson), so too will we unravel the mystery of the dreams, poems and words...eventually, when we make the links

When conscious we are 'aware of a significant percentage' of our own thoughts and during subconscious thinking we can 'only sense some mysterious, hidden mental activity', while the 'preconscious state is the go between' (Gordon & Poze, 1982, pg.1). So when we try to solve a problem or access our creativity we allow the area we are developing to fall back out of focus into our subconscious. In my book The Generation G.A.P. , I realize my character Jez talks about this process. He talks of focussing and unfocussing, using metaphor and poetry to blur and refocus and how not seeing the wood for the trees can work. Gordon and Poze talk of the 'complete failure' of the creative process without relaxing any 'intense focus on the problem' (1982, pg. 1). Any writer will be able to identify with this process but why do we have to learn the hard way? Why don't we learn this at school?

We don't even learn how our memories work unless we study psychology. Why, when learning and problem solving skills are developmentally the most progressive of tools in the toolbox of life, are we left to discover them for ourselves?

How long would it have taken me to discover the word 'Baba' on my own? Maybe I would never have discovered it. How much more don't we know about ourselves because people took the time to teach us how to tie our shoelaces and how to learn our times tables but not how we think and learn and remember and solve problems (back to the Kolb Cycle)?

 Why don't we teach learning at school?

 
GORDON, W. J. J. and POZE, T. (1981), Conscious/Subconscious Interaction in a Creative Act. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 15: 1–10. doi: 10.1002/j.2162-6057.1981.tb00269.x

The Cycle of Me

The Science Museum Lates series provide a themed midweek monthly night for adults to enjoy a range of films, workshops, talks, exhibits, games and other activities fuelled by liquid refreshment's and a popular and somewhat silent disco.

The Red Mill Engine said it all for me. Watching the massive wheel turn the cogs and pistons to produce steam was just like the cycle of learning. It goes on and on. Even today most of our electricity is still produced from steam turbines. Who knew?

Lighting Fires

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

Attributed to WB Yeats & originating with Heraclitus around 500 BCE

I can't always choose what happens to me but I can choose how I experience it. Whether I see it in terms of motivation, inspiration, warning or confirmation, its all learning.

I set out to live my life this week lighting fires rather than filling pails. I went to a networking meeting in City Hall, worked with the Museum in Docklands on a local history project, got some news of the 'life threatening' variety relating to my daughter's health one day and went to her graduation the next. I learned that fire could be a metaphor for warmth, security and light. It could be the cosy feeling of safety or the flicker of inspiration or the kindling of a passion. It could also burn. All could motivate.

Light

The meeting in City Hall was surprisingly enlightening and inspirational. It sparked ideas. It prompted me to think about writing and learning from it and learning and writing about it. A see-saw Kolb's Cycle. We do something, think about it, make conclusions and surmise, try something and start all over somewhere in the cycle – back and forth and round and round.

Warmth

On the history project, during a tour of St Annes (one of the five Hawksmoors in London), I noticed all the publicity materials and commented that our centre didn't have any. Milly, a 15 year old working on the project said 'You don't need it. We know what you do and we know how good you are.' This made me feel a warm glow. Maybe I was doing something right.

The Burn

Our campfire where we toasted marshmallows

The life threatening news relating to my daughter's health burned. It was a terrifying shock and although she lives with a somewhat debilitating condition already, most long term degeneration is trumped by the slightest invocation of the 'C' word. We hoped it was a warning shot across the bow. A fire that wouldn't take. That it was the hot stove or fireplace where we learned not to play with fire. An early diagnosis would mean early intervention, like a small fire could be more easily put out. But forest fires all start the same – small. I had to tell myself to see it as good news, its not as if the fire was out of control. It could still be a good thing. A warning can be good. That's what I told her.

Security & Passion

Then came graduation day. I had encouraged my daughter to go from the start. I had no idea if it would be a good experience or not but I knew that as much as she could regret going she could also regret not going and at least if she went she could have a basis for her opinion. We went and it was wonderful. Jenny was anxious and nervous, from the putting on of the gown to the walk on stage to receive her scroll but she felt like she had been acknowledged for her achievements by her peers and an institute which shared her passion for learning and it felt good. She had worked and paid her own way through her education with the Open University and had shared with us everything from the excitement of the opening of the box of course materials to the slowly incremental word counts to the too close for comfort deadlines. We got to also share the celebration.

Tony Benn's son was there to receive an honorary doctorate posthumously on behalf of his father. He talked about his fathers activism and love of learning. He talked about when discussions abounded regarding raising the age of compulsory education to 18 and how his father had disagreed. Tony Benn said that the age of compulsory education should not be raised to 18 but to 95! He advocated lifelong learning. He had not been challenged on this assertion, apart from one man who told him that 95 didn't work because he was 96!

'Its not every day you get your dream job', a mum of a young man I have worked with, commented this week. 'Thank you', she said, he couldn't have done it without youse.'

None of us can do it without each other. That's what I learned this week. We motivate and inspire each other. We are each others fires.

Why This Blog?

An outdoor adventure weekend full of kids facing their fears and trying new things and it took a few grown ups, who should know better, to knock my confidence in the world.

'You got your passport?' a neighbour asked watching the street fill with men from the local mosque. I'm not even British, I reminded her, of course I had a passport, and she laughed.

It was the tip of the iceberg of my disappointment that week. It wasn't as if I didn't know people thought such things. I was more disappointed that they thought it was acceptable to voice such things to me and that I had to contend with them either by parrying or arguing the case for the opposition in each case, while still maintaining a sort of status-quo. The liberal dilemma.

I had been to City Hall on Monday and heard many inspirational stories, from the teens who had done their Duke of Edinburgh award expedition with their children to the practice of living by inspirational quotes to using film as a medium of enlightenment and change.

I thought about my work and how I could better inspire the people I work with. Maybe I could start a discussion group, I thought. We could choose an inspirational quote a week and live it and discuss how our weeks had gone living by the quote. I quickly dismissed this idea. Why do something I have no idea works and dictate terms from a position of uninformed power? Maybe I should do it myself first, I thought. I could do a year long experiment. A year of learning from people in the know, living my life according to their advice. Research gurus from Gandhi to Grover. Find out the meaning of life, not in the quantitative terms of money or power or even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's 42 but in qualitative terms. How could I improve the quality of my life and those around me? How could I take the lessons of the learned and apply them to my life and be able to reflect on them and learn?

Although I thought of this improvement in terms of a quote a week, giving me 52 Quotes, that's where the numbers ended or even began. A year was, I thought a place to start. I hoped for it to continue further, for as long as there were people to inspire and as long as I could learn. That was the experiment. The question was whether it could take on a life of its own and be a upward and outward cycle of never ending learning?

First I had to check to see if I was replicating other work in this field so I did an online search and found a range of websites with the tag 52 Quotes. I found 52 Quotes to Live By, which at first seemed interesting but was not like my idea, it was more instruction on how to use the quote rather than discussion of the experience of living by the quote. Another site was about success and bumper stickers. Another was lessons in mindfulness not about actually doing what other people say to do, from their lessons learnt.

I decided what I wanted to do was not for success or inner peace or any amount of navel gazing but needed to be more reflection in action as well as on action. It had to be more praxis led (Paulo Friere and Kolb) for a better me and better world around me. I was happy to start with me.

I wanted to inspire and needed inspiration, and I knew my words weren't good enough for either. That's when I thought of my first quote. One I had used many times before. when talking about other people but this time I related it to myself and this week I decided, I would live it out. To inspire and be inspired. And to learn.

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

Attributed to WB Yeats & originating with Heraclitus around 500 BCE

Freire, P. (1995) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth, Penguin

Kolb D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall