Gillian Dick is a member of the Education and Life-long Learning Committee (ELLC) and is the Spatial Planning Manager – Research & Development at Glasgow City Council.
When someone says to you that you need to reflect on an action, task, or learning experience, particularly as part of logging your CPD, what do you think? Oh no, here we go again. I’ve got to write something to say I enjoyed it and I learnt this. It gets even more confusing if what you are being asked to do is called reflective practice. But reflective practice and its sister tool reflexive monitoring are two really useful skills to have at your disposal.
What is reflective practice?
Reflective practice is the process of thoughtfully considering your experiences in applying knowledge and skills in professional settings. It involves a cycle of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting, which helps professionals learn from their experiences and improve future performance.
In planning, reflective practice enables professionals to critically assess the impact of their decisions on communities, environments, and policy outcomes. It fosters a mindset of continuous learning, ethical awareness, and adaptability—qualities essential for navigating the complexities of modern planning.
Why reflective practice matters in Planning
Planning is inherently complex, involving multiple stakeholders, competing interests, and long-term consequences. Reflective practice helps planners navigate this complexity by:
- Enhancing decision-making: By reflecting on past decisions, planners can identify what worked, what didn’t, and why. This leads to more informed and effective future decisions.
- Promoting ethical awareness: Reflection encourages planners to consider the ethical dimensions of their work, including issues of equity, sustainability, and public interest.
- Supporting lifelong learning: The planning profession is constantly evolving due to changes in policy, technology, and societal needs. Reflective practice ensures that planners remain current and competent.
- Improving communication and collaboration: Reflecting on interactions with colleagues, clients, and communities can improve interpersonal skills and foster better collaboration.
Challenges and tips for effective reflective practice
Here’s the things that I do to help me reflect on the work that I have done:
- Make time: Set aside time weekly or monthly to review your work and learning.
- Capture your thoughts: I have a notebook where I note meetings, conversations, the amount of emails dealt with, and what I still need to focus on.
- Sense check: I regularly talk to team members, peers and friends to sense-check my knowledge and understanding.
- Be honest: Reflection is most valuable when it is candid and self-critical, but be kind to yourself.
- Think about your goals and aspirations: Where do you want to go? Are your work areas taking you there?
Reflexive monitoring
Reflexive monitoring is an evaluation method that provides urban practitioners with real-time insights into the progress of their projects. It allows them to assess daily activities and respond to them while keeping the bigger picture in mind. This approach is particularly useful for addressing complex challenges associated with place-based approaches, such as climate change and social exclusion. Reflexive monitoring helps transform barriers into opportunities by integrating different perspectives, types of knowledge, and fostering collaboration. Unlike traditional monitoring and evaluation methods, which assess the effects of a policy retrospectively and lack flexibility, reflexive monitoring is applied in real-time throughout the implementation of a project. It also encourages the participation of various actors, including citizens, voluntary groups, and enterprises, in the monitoring and evaluation activities.
Some pointers for reflexive monitoring
- Encourages proactive problem solving – by solving the problem in real time, not retrospectively.
- Takes context into account – by revealing the complexities of the problem and breaking it down into learning questions –which leads to better solutions.
- Turns learnings into actions when they’re needed – by focussing on learning, barriers and structural changes (changes that require participants to rethink the way they act, organise and approach a topic) are addressed and translated into actions and learning outcomes.
It has a role in:
- Supporting the planning of the project
- Evaluating daily activities, decisions and progress
- Aligning daily activities with long-term ambitions and impact
- Facilitating reflection on problems and solutions, allowing for the adapting of activities
- Identifying actions to address (institutional) barriers
- Coming up with creative solutions because existing procedures and structures are questioned
- Institutionalising learning in daily activities
- Capturing lessons useful for external communication
- Engaging with (knowledge) experts in a novel way
- Offering insights and clarity in complex processes
- Comprehending how to influence the wider system, to be more transformative and have more systemic impact
So go ahead and practice reflecting and reflexing, you may be surprised at the benefits!
