A Guide To Nursing Students’ Written Reflection For Students And Educators

Prepare an annotated bibliography and reflection using scholarly literature that:

1. Focusses on the topic:
   
   ‘How can Nurses use reflective practice to promote  safe, caring, quality nursing care?’
   
   
2. Complete an annotated bibliography that summarises two different nursing articles (two annotations).

3. Each of the two annotations needs to consider how the article could be beneficial or not, in promoting  safe, caring, quality nursing care.
   
   
4. In addition, you must write  three reflective evaluation paragraphsunder the heading of each question addressing the following key points below:
   
   
   1. What  have you reflectively  learned that you can improve on from reading the 2 articles?       
   2. How could you use reflection in your future to develop critical awareness in your nursing practice?
   3. Describe Reflection on and in practice.

Purpose of Article

A short clear statement of the purpose of this article The purpose of the article is to offer guidelines to nursing students’ written reflections for students and educators

An accurate, succinct account of the ideas, theories, research findings or arguments used in the article The authors seek to explore reflective writing from the viewpoint of the nursing student and the educator in nursing by considering various sections such as advantages, the need for reflective writing in nursing courses, the barriers to the use of reflective writing, and the nurse educator’s work in student reflection.  Reflective writing helps in the synthesis of the classroom and clinical knowledge and the development of the skill of critical thinking, improves self-awareness, develops professional growth and enhances professional conduct, and builds a relationship. The use of reflective writing is faced with various barriers. For instance, the process of reflective writing involves sharing of assignments from other departments and the feedback ought to be original thus making the exercise cumbersome and time-consuming. Additionally, students have generally a negative attitude towards writing due to anxiety that is associated with writing. The article also points out that nurse educators have critical roles in student reflection such as identifying topics of reflection for the students. The article asserts that semi-structured reflective writing models have guidelines that vividly show the purpose of the assignment of the evaluation technique. Examples include the reflective grid, Bakers Four-Step Model, and the BEGAN method. 195 words

Provides a justified identification of the intended audience 

Usefulness of the Article 

Clearly explain  the potential usefulness (or not) of the article to support the essay topic:

How nurses can use  reflective practice to promote  safe, caring, quality nursing care.

The intended audience of the article are the nursing student and nurse educator. The title of the article is “a guide to nursing students’ written reflection for students and educators”, this title itself clearly points to the intended audience. Additionally, the research questions are prove of the intended audience.

The article is useful to nurses for it shows how they can use reflective practice to promote safe, caring, quality nursing care. For instance, the article discusses the benefits of article writing such as development of critical thinking skill, creation of self-awareness, professional growth and promotion of professional behaviours, and relationship building. Thus the article emphasizes that a thorough understanding of the advantages of reflective practice to the nursing students and nurse educators will enable them to rightly use it to promote safe caring and quality nursing care. The article also discusses the role of nurse educator in student reflection; an aspect which is critical in promoting reflective practice among the students with different attitudes towards reflective writing.

How nurses can use  reflective practice to promote  safe, caring, quality nursing care.

The intended audience of the article are both the nursing student and nursing educator. This is justifiably true because the objective of the article is to show reflection as a four dimensional process by adding two additional reflections (reflection-before-action and reflection-beyond-action) to the existing two dimensional reflection (reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action). Furthermore, the authors argue that when reflection is viewed as a four dimensional process, that is when it can provide access to better professional practice; which is relevant to both nursing students and nurse educators.

Intended Audience

This article is of importance to the nurses for it shows them how they can utilize reflective practice to promote safe, caring, quality nursing care. For instance, the authors contend that restricting nursing practice to two dimensions only doesn’t give access to improved professional practice but with the incorporation of the two more dimensions, nurses can process their reflection before-action, in-action, on-action, and beyond-action as a way of broadening and deepening their comprehension of professional practice.

Reflections

I have learned about one of the major barriers to reflective writing is the negative attitude of students towards writing (Naber & Wyatt, 2014). This can be attributed to former struggles on the negative feedback due to poor performance in assignments with regard to grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Thus, I intend to improve on excising positive attitude towards writing in general in order to improve my writing, in general, more so reflective writing. I have also learnt that reflective writing builds relationships by creating community through facilitation discussion and enhances associations among learners and with the faculty (Kerr, 2010). Students are able to deliberate on clinical experiences that they have reflected on and suggestions on how they can better their skills and practices. I, therefore, plan to practice much of reflective writing in order to develop and foster relationships among peers and faculty as a way of improving my professional skill and actions. I have also learnt that it is not only important to reflect in action (during the activity), and on action (after the activity) but to also reflection relevant theory before action and beyond action in order to gain access to advanced professional practice which could otherwise be impossible (Edwards, 2017). 205 words.

I intend to use reflection in my future to develop critical awareness by reflectively writing about my clinical experiences thus assisting me to ascertain the areas that require improvement (Wald & Reis, 2010).  I will begin by choosing a reflective model and apply it in systematically reflecting in a given event, and record in a reflective journal. In my reflectional journal, I will categorise the experiences as superficial, medium, and deep reflections. Superficial reflections will be more of a descriptive reflection in which I will largely describe the occurrence of events. It will cover the events and the possible causes of the events. Under Medium reflection, I will go further to explore thoughts, opinions and views on what has happened as a process of finding the solution to the problem. The medium category of reflection derives meaning from the lessons learned and the possible action for the future. The deep reflection is a critical reflection which demonstrates that the event has made changes in the individual’s perspective of self, relationships, society etc. this will demand that I be cognizant of the impact of the chosen incident on other situations. I will also incorporate some references to relevant extant literature. 199 words

Reflection-in-practice is the retroactive scrutiny of an event already undertaken so as to ascertain the knowledge used in actual situations through the examining and interpreting the information that is remembered (Edwards, 2013). Thus, it encompasses a reconsideration of the event that has already taken place. Yanow & Tsoukas (2009) argues that it encompasses the conversion of information into knowledge by the use of a post-mortem that is cognitively undertaken, which further facilitates the step by step development of decision making. Bolton (2010) reasons that reflection-in-practice increases an individual’s knowledge but at the same time also challenges the existing theories and concepts.  Reflection-on-practice involves a manner in which practice can be developed or changed after practice (Edwards, 2008). In other words, the reflection is on the action, contemplating on what one has done so as to ascertain how the knowledge of the action may have prevented to the unexpected outcome. This approach enables the practitioner to redesign the activity while it is being carried out and is thus associated by an experienced practitioner.  The steps of reflection-on-practice can be grouped into four; the first one is to choose an incident, reflect on the situation before intervention and afterwards, merge the gap before and after.

References

Bolton, G. (2010). Reflective practice: Writing and professional development. Sage publications.

Edwards, S. (2008). Leadership and management in curriculum design: Bureaucracies, subservience and subordination. Nurse education today, 28(2), 131-133.

Edwards, S. (2017). Reflecting differently. New dimensions: reflection-before-action and reflection-beyond-action. International Practice Development Journal, 7(1).

Edwards, S. L. (2013). Learning from practice: the value of story in nurse education (Doctoral dissertation).

Kerr, L. (2010). More than words: applying the discipline of literary creative writing to the practice of reflective writing in health care education. Journal of Medical Humanities, 31(4), 295-301.

Naber, J., & Wyatt, T. H. (2014). The effect of reflective writing interventions on the critical thinking skills and dispositions of baccalaureate nursing students. Nurse Education Today, 34(1), 67-72.

Wald, H. S., & Reis, S. P. (2010). Beyond the margins: reflective writing and development of reflective capacity in medical education. Journal of general internal medicine, 25(7), 746-749.

Yanow, D., & Tsoukas, H. (2009). What is reflection?in?action? A phenomenological account. Journal of management studies, 46(8), 1339-1364.