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Social Work vocabulary · Practice Approaches

Reflective practice

Meaning in social work, with examples

nounCommon term

In social work, reflective practice means: Thinking carefully about your own work, feelings, assumptions and decisions in order to learn from them and improve future practice.

In Turkish: yansıtıcı uygulama, düşünümsel uygulama

How it is used

Central to social work education: students write reflective logs and essays, often using models such as Kolb's or Gibbs' cycle. Qualified workers reflect in supervision and team discussions. The adjective reflective is common: a reflective account.

Example sentences

  1. Reflective practice helped me notice that I was avoiding the father.

  2. Students must show evidence of reflective practice in their placement portfolio.

Common collocations

  • engage in reflective practice
  • reflective log
  • reflective account
  • critical reflection
  • supervisionRegular protected meetings in which a social worker discusses cases, decisions, workload, learning and wellbeing with a more experienced manager or colleague.
  • anti-oppressive practiceAn approach that recognises how power, discrimination and inequality affect people's lives and works to challenge them, both in the system and in the worker's own practice.
  • burnoutA state of physical and emotional exhaustion caused by long-term work stress, often with feelings of detachment and reduced effectiveness.
  • placementThe home or setting where a child in care or an adult needing care is placed to live; also a period of supervised practice for social work students.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Practice Approaches

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