Learning through reflection

An essential element of continual, evolving midwifery is the need for midwives to critically reflect on their practice in order to inform and improve care for childbearing women. Reflection involves learning through everyday experiences and forms an integral part of undergraduate and post-graduate higher education midwifery programmes. It is an in-depth view of events, whereby the reflector reviews a situation and attempts to work out what happened, what they felt or thought about it, who or what influenced particular actions and how they would respond if it happened again. Reflection supports life-long learning by cultivating insight into professional practice, increasing self-awareness and allowing for deeper understanding of analysis and evaluation to strengthen critical inquiry and inform practice (Kirkham, 1997).

Reflection can be defined as ‘to think, meditate or ponder’, and is a philosophical understanding of how we gain knowledge through experience (Johns, 2009). The concept of reflective thinking as part of learning as initiated by the philosopher and educationalist John Dewey, who defined it as: