Reflective practice involves thoughtfully, honestly, and critically examining various aspects of your professional work. It calls for a conscious commitment to setting aside time for self-reflection and has long been acknowledged as a cornerstone of maintaining safety and delivering quality in any field.

Reflection can occur before, during or after an event. It can help process something that triggered you in the course of your work. It can also help shape how you anticipate approaching something complex or challenging in the future. It is fundamentally about increasing our self awareness.

Reflective practice helps you identify your motivations, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The processing that occurs by reflecting can enhance our personal insight and grow our professional practice.

Reflection is more than thinking and discussing. It is also about deconstructing, unpacking or pulling things apart to gain a better understanding. It is about seeing connections and appreciating different perspectives.

Based on theories about how people learn, this model centers on the concept of developing understanding through actual experiences and contains four key stages:

• Concrete experience
• Reflective observation
• Abstract conceptualization
• Active experimentation 

The model argues that we start with an experience - either a repeat of something that has happened before or something completely new to us. The next stage involves us reflecting on the experience and noting anything about it which we haven't come across before. We then start to develop new ideas as a result, for example when something unexpected has happened we try to work out why this might be. The final stage involves us applying our new ideas to different situations. This demonstrates learning as a direct result of our experiences and reflections.