Reflection is at the heart of true continuing professional development

The acronym 'CPD' rolls easily off the tongue, but too often we forget what it really means. CPD has become, for many, a chore that has to be done, a box that has to be ticked. With the upcoming changes to continuing professional development for solicitors in England and Wales, perhaps we should be looking at it anew.

Assuming you want to get better at what you do, activities that improve your knowledge and skills seem like obvious choices. But, lawyers are time poor and the urgencies of work and lives conspire to derail attempts to do formal training and education. This is where an understanding of reflection and its role within the learning process can help a lot. Reflection, when used consciously as a tool, can greatly enhance the learning that is available from your normal day-to-day activities. It takes less time than you might think and counts as CPD under the new regime.

If you ask people where they learned most of what they know, most will say through experience. If you ask them how they learn best, most will say through doing things. And yet, if you ask them how that learning actually happened, they won't be able to tell you. So much of what we learn seems to be a side-effect of living.

Whenever we do something, we have an idea of what we would like to achieve, even if the outcome is vague and outside of our conscious awareness. We want our world to be just a little different after the activity. At an internal level, our unconscious minds notice whether we achieved our outcome, or if there is still a gap between what we achieved and what we wanted to achieve. The recognition of this gap, even though we are not conscious of it, is the most basic form of reflection and we learn as a result.

Thankfully, this unconscious informal learning is automatic. We will always be learning something just by going about our day-to-day activities. But there is so much more that can be gleaned if we take a couple of extra steps.

Reflective learning

The first step is to make reflection conscious and purposeful. We often mull over in our minds something we did earlier in the day, like a meeting or a conversation, but this reflection will lead to little useful learning unless it is focused in the right direction. Endlessly replaying how badly you did something and mentally beating yourself up for it will not lead to a better experience next time.

Instead, focus your reflection by putting it in a question frame: "How can I …?" "What if I …?"

Imagine how the scenario could play out differently with a realistic and successful outcome. Rehearse this in your mind. It is also worth playing with some creative thinking tools. Change the numbers to be much bigger or smaller, imagine how you could make the result much worse to get insight into what actually went wrong, or imagine how it would play out in a different location. Your goal is to extract the key lessons from your experience. Go beyond learning by 'doing' into learning by 'thinking'.

In a Harvard Business School study on reflection, people on a four-week training course were asked to spend the last 15 minutes of each day reflecting on what they had learned during the day. In the final exam, they outperformed by 22.8 per cent those who did 15 minutes more class time but had no purposeful reflection.¹

Get in the habit of reviewing a few of your day's activities each day, either alone or, ideally, with someone else. A few minutes of discussion can generate a lot more and a different quality of reflection as you assemble your thoughts to verbalise what happened and how you could do things differently next time. The other person does not need to be an expert in your field; sometimes this can be an advantage. It is surprising what new insights we can arrive at when trying to explain what we do to someone with no background in our field, or to a child.

The other side of that coin is where the person we are discussing our activity with knows more than we do about it and can provide comments based on their own experience and understanding. Of course, if the other person was also present during the activity, they will have their own observations on what actually happened and so be able to give you feedback from another viewpoint.

It is well worth having an agreement with a colleague to spend a few minutes each morning sharing your reflections on a couple of activities from the previous day. You can help each other to grow and become better in your practice.

Reflection is a fundamental part of learning, and therefore a fundamental part of CPD.

Paul Matthews is the founder of People Alchemy (www.peoplealchemy.co.uk) and author of Informal Learning at Work and Capability at Work.

Reference

1. See Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance,
   D. Stefano at al, HBS Working
   Paper No. 14-093, March 2014