Week 5 presented an interesting waypoint as it offered an opportunity to look back and reflect on my learning thus far with the intent (I believe) of applying course correction for the future.
This week’s learning objectives were:
- Develop the ability to discuss the nature of reflection
- Outline the plan of reflection within Agile Scrum development
- Produce reflective writing that not only reviews your development in a meaningful way, but also identifies SMART goals that can support your development in the future
This week’s reflective post is intended to fulfil the last of these points and has the secondary purpose to improve my reflective writing skills based on the first point.
Self reflection is a skill I’ve tried to practice for some years. It’s not something I’ve been taught to do but rather something that has developed over the years and as such my methods are very likely polluted with some very bad habits. I think that’s why I found Alcwyn Parker’s discussion on The Five Reflective Domains so very insightful and have captured the salient points in the mind-map below.
As with so many other topics we have covered on the course, I was left with the realisation that there is such an immense amount of knowledge that not only do I not possess but I am also completely unaware of. Looking back to the summer months when I was teetering on whether or not to apply for this course I would never have believed that within a few short weeks I would be scratching at the surface of writing an article on the psychology of self development. Yet here I am.
I’m not going to discuss the finer points of the five reflective domains — I’m far from qualified to do this** but I would like to look at the application to my own blog as suggested by the Week 5 Challenge activity. Armed with a small amount of knowledge I completed the challenge activity and tagged each post according to my interpretation their respective domain. The results are shown in the spider chart below and were not at all what I expected!
(** My plan is to research this more during reading week next week as the first game jam has taken up a significant amount of time over the last 10 days. My reading list is growing uncontrollably and and is in desperate need of more attention.)
Procedural I can understand from my engineering career as I intuitively analyse systems in an attempt to find and implement improvements. This translates almost seamlessly from operations to skills. Likewise for the Dispositional domain. Without realising it, my earlier posts re. time management and getting organised for the first game jam were indicative of strong reflection in the Dispositional Domain. Both of these two domains feel like a good fit with a psychometric test I took a few years back on a management course where I exhibited a very strong “Enabler” trait.
I was surprised the Affective Domain wasn’t higher. On further analysis the primary driving factor behind this score are my Reflective posts. Until now this it mainly where I’ve reflected on the softer, less tangible areas such as my feelings, emotions and behaviours. Whist I do consider myself quite mindful, perhaps this is an indication that I’m not as comfortable discussing this on a public forum.
The two domains I do need to work on with my critical reflection are clearly Cognitive and Interpersonal. I’ve tried to embrace the former in this post insofar as having looked deeper into my strengths and weaknesses albeit without performing a detailed SWOT analysis. The Interpersonal Domain has not featured at all in my writings to-date. I originally thought this was because my fellow students and I have all been working away in isolation, but as one of my course-mates, Mikolaj Gackowski, quite rightly pointed out, we have been sharing knowledge, ideas and compliments through the Canvas system.
My goal now is to consciously explore both these areas more in future posts to produce a more balanced reflective journal. However, I don’t believe a perfect balance is the correct target to aim for. I feel a conscious awareness of domain coverage through my reflective writing is more appropriate whilst being mindful of outliers and laggards.
List of Images
Figure 1. THORN, 2020 Domains of Reflection
Figure 2. THORN, 2020 Posts by Reflection Domain
References
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
