There is always a margin to improve. Counselling skills are perfect for retrospective use. Identification of the potential problem and therefore to the adoption of the correct solution. Is the natural way of development. After a period of skill usage, it will significantly improve and become more natural to use. In addition, the highest level of competence have those skills, becoming our second nature. The highest indication of skills are those suppressed to uncountienes & automated. However, it must be taken into consideration that counselling role has no screenplay and must be used according to individual need. Everything that we do unconsciously without prior effort Adopting counselling skills to activity as self-reflection or evaluation will lead to improvement of service offer. Constant work with customers and obtaining feedback will help counsellor to adjust and improve their workshops.
11 Explain how self-reflection can improve the use of counselling skills. (AC 7.1)
I need you to look at a reflection model, you can use Gibbs as used in the resource materials or one which you may already use like Kolb, and explain the model and how this relates to how you reflect upon your practice.
The best way of learning is obvious we need to do it. This is possible to write a whole book on how to ride on the bicycle. But even if a learner imprints all the knowledge in his mind it is not possible to learn without practice in real settings. Gibbs’s cycle describes the learning by doing model. It involves all the process of doing in order to learn something. Gibbs’s cycle is also the most natural schema for self-reflection. I used it on daily basis to review my progress and find a gap for improvement. Gibbs cycle is a useful tool and it is used as a frame tool to evaluate own progress and further reflection. Self-reflection according to Gibbs’s cycle helps me to describe the constraints of my issue. Then I moved to the process of expressing my feelings. Those two steps lead to evaluation. Furthermore are based on conclusion and therefore are the background for action plan preparation. Reflective writing takes a solid part of my life. I have been doing it on daily basis and every day I type on the keyboard at the last 1000k strokes. The habit of reflective writing was adopted to help me assess how everyday activities influence my long-term goals. David Kolb (1984), lays to the general public his idea about the learning cycle. Kolb’s Idea is the simplification of the reflection process. First, we write about Experience then we Reflect upon it. The third part of the process is Conceptualise. For purpose of this description, we can explain Conceptualise as a deeper reflection. It is a stage when we try to dive deep into the core. The fourth and final stage is Apply when the act of planning new approaches came into the plan. I used Kolb’s reflective cycle on weekly basis to evaluate and make adjustments to my weekly goals and objectives.