Session Outline

I would like to be the best version of myself, and I would like this to translate into my practice as a personal tutor. Reflection and as a result reflective practice can empower us to be the self-aware, emotionally intelligent individual we want to be and need to be for our students. The reflective process assumes our experiences contain knowledge, specifically knowledge about who we are as people and what constitutes this notion of 'I' (Clarke, 2017 and 2021). This knowledge that we gain of self allows us to therefore become self-aware and inform how we experience our experiences. The self-aware person can be the best version of themselves (Clarke, 2017 and 2021). The notion of reflection recognises that as an individual we are influenced by what by Schön (1983) termed the swampy lowlands of culture, bias, personality, history, politics, morals and values. By exploring our experiences we can understand how these swampy lowlands drive our thoughts and feelings and ultimately affect the way we behave in the world, including how we respond to others, and how and why others respond to us the way they do.

This is what we want for our students. For our personal students to be able to inform how they study and understand themselves in relation to their study's, so they can be the best version of themselves, we want to support them to reflect on their experiences. Reflection not only generates knowledge of self, but the analytical nature of the process, especially when guided further develops in the reflector, those skills of critical thinking, analysis and application of knowledge (Bolton and Delderfield 2018, Clarke 2017 and Brookfield, 2012). These are as we know important skills that will transfer and translate into academia.

This session will therefore explore together our own understanding of reflection and reflective practice. We will uncover reflections theoretical underpinnings so we can ensure we have that important evidence informed understanding of what reflection is. This session will particularly focus on own development as personal tutors to then offer guided reflection to our personal students. We will together explore what guided reflection is, the skills and attitudinal qualities required of us, and we will within the session engage in practising the skills of guided reflection on each other.

The objectives of this session are to therefore:

1. Discuss and review our understanding of reflection.

2. Explore our own experiences of reflection.

3. Explore the principles of guided reflection.

4. Detail the skills required to guide reflection in another.

5. Examine the attitudinal qualities required of the personal tutor.

5. 'Have a go' at supporting guided reflection in each other.

This session will be discursive and interactive in nature and we will be engaged in the reflective process ourselves. As a result we will have a developed understanding of reflection which we can translate into our personal tutor conversations.