Reflection and deliberate practice

This week's focus was on critical reflection and deliberate practice.

During the last week I've really had to make an effort to change my mindset and actively embrace every difficulty I encountered as an opportunity for learning. Tools and software will change at a fast pace throughout my career, which means I will need to be upgrading my skills continuously. Successfully coping with and addressing change, difficulties and challenges is and will be key to growing and developing continuously as I strive to be a lifelong learner (Laal and Bayat, 2012). I know that moving forward all these experiences and how I choose to respond to challenges will help me optimise and streamline my workflow in future projects. The way that you pick yourself back up after you experience failure is where the learning process truly occurs (Mcglynn and Kelly, 2017).

The Five Reflective Domains

Alcwyn Parker's lecture spoke about the five reflective domains and how they relate to critical reflection (Parker, 2021):

• Dispositional domain
• Affective domain (emotional awareness)
• Interpersonal domain (all the skills necessary to effectively interact with other people)
• Cognitive domain (the strengths and weaknesses of your approach to learning)
• Procedural domain (assessing the skills you already have and identifying where improvements are necessary)

The dispositional domain is foundational, and covers things like time management, motivation and discipline. This is definitely the domain in which I am improving the most through the rapid ideation.

In the cognitive domain, I have been watching many tutorials to learn about the software I am using and also about new software, like Principle and Protopie, to rapidly upscale my skills as the project requires. I have found that I am definitely a hands-on learner, the most efficient way for me to learn a new concept is to actively follow a tutorial along and do it myself as I watch. I find that if I don't do this I often fail to grasp concepts fully and have to go back and watch more videos.

SMART Goals

Lawlor and Hornyak (2012) state that in order for a goal to be effective it should be SMART:

1. Specific - you need to define exactly what you are trying to achieve
2. Measurable - you need to be able to track completion of your goal
3. Attainable - the goal needs to be achievable
4. Relevant - the goal should be built around your own personal or corporate aspirations and objectives
5. Timely - you need to be able to complete your goal in a reasonable amount of time

Implementing SMART goals into my practice will help me to produce tangible, actionable and realistic plans in order to continually achieve my personal and professional development. Reflecting on and assessing my performance against the backdrop of SMART goals will help to give me clarity of mind and supercharge my learning.

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References

Laal, M. & Bayat, A. (2012). Challenges for Lifelong Learning. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Lawlor, K. B., & Hornyak, M. J. (2012). Smart Goals: How the Application of Smart Goals can Contribute to Achievement of Student Learning Outcomes. Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, 39, 259.

Mcglynn, K., & Kelly, J. (2017). Self-improvement through goal setting. Science Scope, 41(2), 22–24.

Parker, A. (2021) “The Five Key Skill Domains.”

Robson, S. (2013). INTRODUCTION TO SCRUM AND KANBAN. In Agile SAP: Introducing flexibility, transparency and speed to SAP implementations (pp. 25–32). IT Governance Publishing.