W1 – Reflective Practitioner

INTRODUCTION

To fulfil the requirements of INN634 this is my 300 words reflection on becoming a Reflective Practitioner and the role that has for me in the workplace. This workshop also discusses the QUT ePortfolio and Blogger.

ANALYSIS

I am an external student so I listened to this workshop online. The presentation was easy to hear and the PowerPoint slides were clear and readable.  After listening to the workshop I ask myself a couple of questions which were:

1. Are we as a profession losing people who would be great Librarians but have no confidence in becoming a reflective practitioner.
2. What and why you need to be a reflective practitioner to be an effective information professional?

To help me to answer these questions I decided to do some research what is reflective practice and why you need to be a reflective practitioner.  I did this in a couple of ways: firstly, I read all the information that was found on the blackboard site and following article was very useful:

[Grant, M] To be a reflective practitioner can be beneficial to your future attitudes, behaviour and your professional practices in the workplace. She talks about reflection bring spontaneous but written reflection needs to be learnt and practiced.  This allows me to understand why you need to provide reflections after each assignment. It is a learning tool to help you to be able to reflect when you go out into the workforce. I continue my research looking at other journal articles to see I could find information how Librarians can became a reflective practitioner.  I only found resources for the following

• Educators – [Tompkins, E] A Reflective Teaching Journal: an instructional Improvement tool for Academic Librarians.
• Medicine

PROS

• Good way to show your work and achievements
• Able to become good educators
• Became more transparent
• More visual to employers

CONS

• Demoralising to student who not confidant in their abilities
• Discourage students who want to be librarians not educators

The following YouTube video is a good video to look at because it starts you to understand why you need to reflect on everything you do.

This workshop also helped me to decide not to use QUT ePortfolio and to make my WordPress blog to fulfil the requirements for INN634 Professional Practices. The reason for this is I feel that the QUT ePortfolio is too limited and the display of the ePortfolio boring.

CONCLUSION

I wonder if Librarians use evidence based practices to reflect on their services to their clients. I am here to learn and explore what it is to be information professional so I will continue my research on the topic of librarians and reflective practices.  This will help me to grow and perform as a reflective practitioner in the future.