Facilitating reflection: a review and synthesis of the factors enabling effective facilitation of reflective practice

ABSTRACT

Reflective practice is an inherently personal and relational process, occurring privately within people, and publicly, between people. Consequently, given it positively impacts on professional practice, it has become a personal and professional requirement for professional bodies accrediting practitioners. This literature synthesis aims to consolidate understanding around the factors facilitating reflection by generating insights from a variety of publications across professional contexts. The analytical process involved initial coding and focussed coding wherein article text was fragmented, sorted, and integrated to develop a thematic structure. Analysis resulted in two higher order themes: Factors facilitating reflection; and Facilitator tasks. Results highlighted the value of supportive environments to facilitate open enquiry alongside focussed formal dialogues between peers, more experienced colleagues, and formal facilitators to enrich knowledge, perspectives, insights, and relationships. Further, to begin the reflective process, practitioners and novice learners benefit from support in deconstructing the concept of reflection. Ideally, this would be facilitated by an experienced reflective facilitator who values an open enquiry towards complexity, difference, and emotive responses. This requires safe, supportive, and blame-free environments where facilitators encourage dialogue while modelling qualities such as congruence, acceptance, and empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflective practice
• reflection
• facilitation
• facilitators
• relational

People engage in reflective thinking to varying degrees (Black & Plowright, 2010; Dewey, 1933; Sellheim & Weddle, 2015); although they may be ineffective or unaware of using it (Black & Plowright, 2010), or lack comprehensiveness and accountability (Sellheim & Weddle, 2015). Practitioners are reported as engaging with intuitive and less critical modes of reflection (Schon, 1983). Indeed, it is within most people’s capacity to reflect (Dewey, 1933) and demonstrate knowledge through the ‘intuitive performance of the actions of everyday life’ (Schon, 1983, p. 49). However, formal methods representing ideas, such as writing, conversation, and art, can expedite and focus the process (Marshall, 2017; Marshall et al., 2021). Such modes of representation help make reflective ideas explicit, steadying and focusing the flux of thinking, enabling close-knit reasoning, expediting the construction of meaning (Dewey, 1933).

By representing ideas, opportunities to re-evaluate and re-structure understanding can be created, enabling contemplation to occur privately within people, and publicly, between people (A. Ghaye & Ghaye, 1998), making it an inherently personal and relational process. Relatedly, reflective practice has become a requirement incorporated within the policies of professional bodies accrediting practitioners (for example, Health and Care Professions Council, 2018; The British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, 2018; The British Psychological Society, 2017). Those embarking on their careers or training may need guidance and support to engage with reflective processes (Cropley et al., 2012; Dahl & Eriksen, 2016; Gallagher et al., 2017). However, with such diverse approaches and techniques promoted in the literature, it is important to review the facilitators of reflection. This is important for professions that operationalise reflection as a requisite skill within their membership (Marshall, 2019). Care needs to be taken though to ensure both a comprehensive understanding and to minimise bias towards existing practices and constraints of any one profession, thereby enhancing accessibility and engagement for those at different stages of their training and career development regardless of their professional context. Therefore, the central aim of this study was to review literature from a range of practitioner contexts using these questions:

• In existing literature on reflective practice, what are the common themes in relation to facilitation of reflection across a range of domains?

• How can these themes be understood as supporting facilitators of reflection for practitioners in differing contexts and of varying experience?

Methods

The current study constituted a separate part of a wider study (Marshall et al., 2021); shaped and influenced by the lead author’s constructivist epistemological perspective. A body of literature was formally synthesised to understand how reflection can be facilitated. A search of three databases (PubMed, PsycArticles and Scopus) identified 813 articles. These were evaluated against inclusion/exclusion criteria. For transparency, data files of the body of literature, thematic coding extracts, search terms, and inclusion/exclusion criteria can be viewed in the supplemental files (available at: https://osf.io/s5v37/?view_only=89c3450c38ea4df397883e9435b4b850). There were no time frame restrictions to inclusion and 75 articles were read in full. Exclusion criteria were: the article neither explored nor identified a process of reflection (n = 19); was predominantly quantitative (n = 4); made no contribution to understanding what facilitates reflection (n = 24).

Grounded theory methods have been judged as effective approaches for a meta study (Ronkainen et al., 2021), or a rigorous review of the literature (Wolfswinkel et al., 2013). Using analytic methods traditionally aligned with grounded theory (Wolfswinkel et al., 2013), the text of published literature (n = 28) was fragmented, organised, abstracted, and written into a narrative. A deductive approach was initially used to identify relevant text. Articles were read by the lead author and relevant sections of text were highlighted. These articles were uploaded to NVivo 12 (QSR International Pty Ltd, 2019) and subjected to an inductive analysis. Firstly, initial coding fragmented the highlighted sections of each article into excerpts that were assigned a label capturing the inherent meaning; these remained descriptively close to the original text. Secondly, focused coding involved comparing initial codes against each other and against excerpts, re-arranging initial codes into clusters. Groups of similar initial codes constituted categories which were assigned an overarching, provisional label capturing the inherent meaning of the subordinate codes and original text. As further codes were developed, an ongoing, iterative analytical process integrated them and refined the categories. Finally, memos were written to facilitate the analysis and final synthesis of each category supporting the thematic structure. Inter-rater reliability checks were conducted within the research team to further validate the analytic process (Treharne & Riggs, 2015). To illustrate developed themes, data extracts from this literature will be presented within the results.

Presentation of results

Given the interrelationships and interdependencies within the data, results are combined with discussion to ensure clarity and transparency of how theory has informed these themes. Where excerpts of the data from the original text are included in the narrative, citations are presented (including secondary authors, where pertinent).

Results and discussion

Two higher order themes were generated: Factors facilitating reflection; and Facilitator tasks (Table 1):

Table 1. Summary of themes developed through analysis of data.

Higher order themes	Lower order themes
Factors facilitating reflection	Building relationships through a relational reflective process
	Reflecting with more experienced people and facilitators
	A safe, supportive, and blame-free environment
	Facilitator qualities
Facilitator Tasks	Clarifying roles and expectations
	Helping learners understand reflection and encouraging dialogue
	Mirroring and being student-centred
	Embracing differing perspectives to help practitioners see beyond themselves

Throughout there is an acknowledgement that all practitioners can be learners regardless of level of experience, and all those who partake in reflective practice, including novice learners, can facilitate this process in others. However, when discussing the role of a facilitator within this section, this relates to a person directly tasked with facilitating reflective practices.

Factors facilitating reflection

This theme explores the factors enabling the movement from private reflection to sharing the reflective process with others. These centre around environmental and relational factors, including building relationships derived from a shared reflective process and the qualities of facilitators specifically tasked with facilitating others’ reflective processes.

Building relationships through a relational reflective process

Whilst reflection can be a private or public process (Bradbury-Jones et al., 2010; T. Ghaye & Lillyman, 2014) it is a relational one too, occurring within individuals and between people:

Making meaning from our experience is a relational process—internally between different elements of our consciousness, internally between our personal and social aspects, externally between ourselves and individual others, and within a shared collective. (Jordi, 2011, p. 14)

This is where relationships may be built to facilitate reflective processes. The relationship between practitioner and facilitator is posited as a critical factor in collaboration: ‘Reflective supervision, a “relationship for learning”, posits that the relationship itself, between the supervisor and the practitioner, is the mechanism of change’ (Harrison, 2016, p. 671).

In this scenario, whilst the task of facilitating is implicit, the supervisor still becomes the facilitator of reflective practice, whether the learner is a novice, or an experienced practitioner. For effective learning, it seems important to nurture this relationship and to develop trust and understanding prior to engaging in technical approaches to facilitate reflection (Stains, 2012). Starting instrumental acts of reflection too soon may rupture interpersonal alliances (Calvert et al., 2016), especially for practitioners who may be reluctant or uncomfortable with reflection. For example, mental health nurses are reported as not proactively utilising reflection for development; nevertheless, dedicating time to establish rapport and develop relationships were their initial motivators to engage in reflective groups (Thomas & Isobel, 2019). When practitioner reflective groups are established, the relational experiences from these interactions are often carried into practitioner relationships with clients, positively impacting upon the quality of practice (Harrison, 2016).

Reflecting with more experienced people and facilitators

Relationships can be a vehicle for engagement in reflection, offering opportunities to engage with other people’s knowledge and varying experiences:

The view shared amongst the participants of this study was that coaches could “feed” off the knowledge of others, which may help them make sense of their own coaching and promote further learning. (Cropley et al., 2012, p. 28)

This is important for novices whose body of knowledge of the day-to-day professional working environment may be minimal (Cropley et al., 2012), and so may benefit from reflection with more experienced people:

… managers asserted that the reflection space created within the continuing education intervention constituted a space for support between [newly graduated nurses] and more experienced nurses, and that it was an opportunity to strengthen the bonds within the teams. (Goudreau et al., 2015, p. 576)

Providing space for reflection between team members with a range of experience becomes an environmental and relational catalyst for reflective learning; it can also help bring teams together, strengthening working relationships. Further, it can be helpful for different cohorts to support each other:

Facilitators expressed merit in the benefits of having students from different years of the pre-registration (years 1, 2, 3 and 4) and post-registration (part 1 and 2) education programmes together and viewed this as enhancing the learning that occurred. (Gallagher et al., 2017, p. 11)

Building networks of peer support where peers’ experience is valued, also facilitates the reflective process. Such networks and relationships can be informal and formal; even online communities may successfully encourage group reflection (Stoszkowski & Collins, 2017); and practitioners may informally reflect together on difficulties: ‘… occasionally a coach would contact another respected coach and ask for strategies to help resolve a challenging issue’ (Gilbert & Trudel, 2001, p. 27).

Solitary reflection can be difficult for novice learners who may need support to attain higher levels of abstraction (Dahl & Eriksen, 2016). In this context, the coach is a facilitator of reflection, making relationships a fundamental enabler of formalised reflection. People can also be encouraged to reflect if support systems are in place (Cropley et al., 2012): ‘From the outset, it was felt that the process of reflective learning would require careful facilitation. A system of mentoring was therefore initiated in conjunction with the portfolio’ (Bush & Bissell, 2008, p. 104).

The person undertaking this role may again be called a facilitator and within the relationship they can provide a practical and conceptual support system assisting practitioners to develop skills within their profession and integrate these with theoretical understanding; this is attained through activities aimed at connecting knowledge to practice (Kinchin et al., 2008). Potentially, reflection can be a developmental process for all practitioners, with individuals also having the potential to facilitate the learning of others, given appropriate circumstances.

A safe, supportive, and blame-free environment

As reflection thrives on relational experiences, a prerequisite for any process is a sense of safety and support within an environment where ideas can be shared openly:

Given that a central purpose of reflective consultation is to support practitioners in the field, the model validates that in this case, the reflective consultation group provided a supportive, safe, relational experience that practitioners valued. (Harrison, 2016, p. 680)

This sense of safety encourages open and genuine disclosure (Calvert et al., 2016): ‘Facilitation skills include ability to challenge, but also ability to create a safe environment. Open reflection becomes easier in a climate of safety that cultivates honesty’ (Dahl & Eriksen, 2016, p. 405).

Therefore, if the opportunities are provided for reflection to occur, perhaps one of the most optimal conditions is ensuring organisations support blame-free environments: ‘… the role of facilitator was integral to promoting an enabling and supportive environment for the reflective process, and the very personal nature of reflective activity’ (Gallagher et al., 2017, p. 12).

Enabling an environment where learners and practitioners can speak freely can be challenging, given dialogues can trigger difficult, emotive responses. The literature notes ways blame-free environments can be attained, for example, through peer support (Harrison, 2016; Weatherston et al., 2010), mentoring with experienced colleagues (Bulman et al., 2014), or adopting a learning circle approach where the physical positioning of individuals creates an environment that physically signifies equality (Walker et al., 2013). Nevertheless, it seems critical to the facilitation of reflective practice that the environment and dynamics within this are genuinely blame-free and safe. In formal reflective processes, this also requires the embodiment of certain qualities within the facilitator.

Facilitator qualities

Creating a safe, supportive, and blame-free environment for practitioners requires relational factors for reflection:

Carl Rogers describes the facilitator as a catalyst, allowing clients or students to draw their own conclusions, creating their own prescription for change. He described “core conditions” for the facilitative process, both counselling and educational. These are congruence (realness), acceptance, and empathy. (Fanning & Gaba, 2007, p. 119)

By embodying the core conditions of congruence, acceptance, and empathy (Rogers, 2001), a skilled facilitator ensures learning occurs through the reflective process; these conditions presuppose self-awareness and self-regulation of one’s cognitive and emotional experience. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a facilitator genuinely empathising with a variety of differing perspectives and viewpoints (some of which may conflict with their own) unless they engage in purposeful and open-minded reflection (Cropley et al., 2012), and are able to compartmentalise their own beliefs and experiences (Gearing, 2004). Indeed, attuning fully to another person’s experience involves a conscious and deliberate effort, interacting with a disposition of open-mindedness (Marshall et al., 2021). Such attentive listening and empathic attunement to experiences and perspectives allows the expression of difficulties, differences, and vulnerability. Any scenario which fosters openness, should also enable the expression of difficult experiences where people’s vulnerabilities are acknowledged and they feel valued (Harrison, 2016; Weatherston et al., 2010).

If an individual’s viewpoint constitutes their framework of understanding, then a facilitator needs to ensure practitioners’ integrity and sense of self are maintained. Thus, any challenging of ideas should be conducted in an honest, nurturing, empathic and emotionally supportive manner (Bulman et al., 2014). This would necessitate the facilitator utilising skills and tools to ensure those they are facilitating also maintain this stance towards each other (Hendricks et al., 1996).

Facilitator tasks

This theme explores tasks to facilitate a reflective journey. Facilitators enable roles and expectations to be clarified and they model the necessary qualities which allow differing views to be voiced and alternative perspectives to be considered.

Clarifying roles and expectations

One way to promote safe reflection, without fear of criticism or judgment, is for facilitators to ensure participants have a clear understanding of roles and expectations: ‘… having safety in which roles and expectations were clearly defined so that the learner teacher could reflect without fear of criticism and judgment’ (Platzer et al., 2000, p. 690).

To enact this, it is important to clarify group members’ expectations and find an agreement where responsibility for learning remains with the individual:

The staff here believe that reflection is not a process that the facilitator can do for the group, and this view needs to be explored and agreed with group members. (Hendricks et al., 1996, p. 99)

At the outset, the traditional teacher-student didactic relationship can be reshaped towards students finding their own understanding (Hendricks et al., 1996): ‘It (the relationship between the tutor and the candidate) should not be one-way traffic, a good tutor facilitates’ (Nelson & Cushion, 2006, p. 181).

Helping learners to understand and encouraging dialogue

Before engaging in the process of reflection it is also important that learners understand what reflection is and what it is not:

Our results also suggest the possible benefit of engaging students in introductory sessions on the theoretical basis of the reflective learning methodology before beginning its definitive implementation in the curriculum. (Fernández-Peña et al., 2016, p. 64)

Particularly for novice learners, this introduction should include the definitions, purpose and process of reflection and its alignment with professional practice (Cropley et al., 2012). Within the dialogical aspects of reflection, providing guidelines and sharing examples seems prudent: ‘One recommendation is to increase the structure with examples of what to reflect on and provide guidelines regarding when to complete the reflective practice’ (Cooper & Wieckowski, 2017, p. 257).

Whilst guidelines may help structure the reflective process, structures can also constrain the process; this prescribed focus may inhibit a flexible and genuine enquiry into one’s curiosities. Therefore, an important facilitator task is to help learners understand that structures are provisional and can be adapted to individual and group needs. Through gaining hands-on experience with reflective practice, facilitators can encourage learners to deconstruct their own individualised experiences of reflection: ‘This is not to define the process and outputs of thinking for students and measure their performance, but rather help the student’s own deconstruction and personal evaluation of the phenomenology of individual reflection’ (Ixer, 2016, p. 819). This task may also result in an exploration of layers of understanding:

… when using advocacy-inquiry, educators seek to uncover learners’ rationale for action or mental models by stating a concrete observation and sharing their point of view or judgment about it before inquiring about the learners’ perspective. (Eppich & Cheng, 2015, p. 107)

This two-way process aims to understand the reasons for practical actions whilst allowing the facilitator the space to make informed judgements, conceptualising their perspective for the learner rather than pushing for quick solutions (Hall, 2020). Here the facilitator tasks may be integral to the reflective process for novice learners and experienced practitioners, facilitating supportive dialogues that promote reflective learning. Indeed, reflection is an active process, requiring engagement to build a shared endeavour and enacted through questioning: ‘How does one implement reflection in coaching or teaching if one has not done so before? It is recommended to simply start by asking open-ended questions and allow for conversation to occur’ (Gordon, 2017, p. 27).

Further, facilitators may design questions and protocols that prompt nuanced description and develop recall through shared dialogues:

People may need to go over the event several times as they are encouraged to recall the event in as much detail as possible. Other people who played a part are described, along with their actions. Feelings associated with the event are expressed. (Hendricks et al., 1996, p. 100)

The task of the facilitator during these conversations is to encourage dialogue and signpost important ideas to elaborate on (Hendricks et al., 1996); the facilitator or other group members may need to go further: ‘Intervention by other individuals may be necessary to steer the direction of thought, or to ensure that misconceptions do not occur’ (Roberts, 2008, p. 5).

Through this dialogue, learners are helped to vent constructively, with the facilitator summarising the topic of discussion and drawing together the threads of meaning and plans for change (Hendricks et al., 1996). Focussed collaborative conversations have been shown to facilitate pre-service teachers’ professional learning and development (Jao et al., 2020), and enable teachers to make sense of experiences and their practice (Jarvis & Clark, 2020).

Mirroring and being student-centred

In facilitating dialogue, it is important for facilitators to model their professional, reflective practices: ‘Teachers also need to mirror themselves and be ready to stand in front of the mirror with students and fellow teachers’ (Dahl & Eriksen, 2016, p. 405).

A facilitator is, therefore, a role model who engages in the process and helps other people examine their experience from a variety of perspectives, questioning their self and agency in the context of practice (Koh et al., 2017).

Facilitators may encourage learners to be active enquirers within an autonomous, supportive, environment:

Bolton claims that a reflective facilitator does not so much lead students, as create an environment where they lead themselves; the through-the-mirror facilitators stay in uncertainty with their participants achieving active dynamic engagement. (Bolton, 2010, as cited in Dahl & Eriksen, 2016, p. 404)

Consequently: ‘The teachers play a key role in facilitating students’ opportunities to lead themselves, which means that students need to be involved as active agents’ (Dahl & Eriksen, 2016, p. 405).

Therefore, facilitators should encourage a student-led process beginning with the thoughts of the learner: ‘The facilitator began the session but from there on it was mainly student led and I thought that this was great, everyone had their say and opinions were really valued’ (Gallagher et al., 2017, p. 10).

This advice may result in changing the dynamic of learner and facilitator, potentially blurring hierarchies in ways that could be challenging. It might therefore be prudent to balance student-led and facilitator-led dialogue, thus encouraging facilitator involvement as a co-constructor and co-learner. The facilitator then has an opportunity to model the process and focus dialogue should it become unproductive: ‘They should be role models for reflective practitioners and act as co-learners rather than teachers’ (Hendricks et al., 1996, p. 99).

Modelling reflection with examples can assist learners to develop a clear image of what reflection looks like. This may be uncomfortable sometimes as people move into new ways of engaging with one another. Specifically, facilitators could engage in reflection in a manner that is visible to learners. For example, in teacher education, learners were allowed to access an experienced teacher’s personal reflective diary (Loughran, 1996). Such student-centred activities help learners remember that facilitators are not all-knowing but may be co-learners, on a reflective learning journey themselves.

As individuals come with differing prior experiences and personal preferences, it may be prudent to explore with learners the reasoning for an approach and offer differentiated activities to ensure everyone can make effective use of the learning environment; thus, aiming to be student-centred and respecting individual agency. Indeed, it is important to collaborate with learners to develop individual approaches to reflection that suit them and the working context (Cropley et al., 2012; Knowles et al., 2006). Further, being student-centred necessitates the ability to embrace opportunities which support the exploration and understanding of insights originating from differing perspectives.

Embracing differing perspectives and helping practitioners to see beyond themselves

Solitary reflection has the advantage of acknowledging and integrating individual understanding and making sense of complex or perplexing experiences. When others are invited to confirm, challenge, or enlarge interpretations, collective understanding can develop. Group reflection can facilitate the trading of ideas, fostering an environment of enquiry and change (Cropley et al., 2012; Gustafsson & Fagerberg, 2004). Additionally, the task of a reflective practitioner may be to offer the exploration of previously unconsidered views: ‘Practitioners necessitate guidance and support to see beyond themselves and to assert their personal practice’ (Duffy, 2007, p. 1404).

Reflecting with others offers new ways of looking at ideas and perspectives directly shifting ongoing experiences and understanding (Kaunisto et al., 2013). Perhaps positive relational qualities, coupled with individual dispositions towards being open-minded, facilitates a willingness to listen to others’ perspectives. This may be pertinent when reflecting on dilemmas, interpersonal difficulties, or difficult emotive responses (Harrison, 2016; Ostorga, 2006).

Given misunderstandings can influence our understanding of ourselves and our practice (Dahl & Eriksen, 2016), different perspectives offer an opportunity to challenge our assumptions (Platzer et al., 2000). Thus, input from peers may address misconceptions (Chin & Brown, 2002); it may also challenge an idea and enrich a person’s private reflection (Cropley et al., 2012). Therefore, disparate points of view should be welcomed:

Differences in points of view and thoughts are essential for learning and development – the differences (i.e., the differential potential of the supervision) between supervisee and supervisor providing perspective and thus the basis for reflection. (Frølund & Nielsen, 2009, p. 100)

The task of managing disagreements sensitively can encourage participants to view these moments as opportunities for learning rather than threats. As practitioners offer perspectives grounded in varying experiences, the idea that shared reflection offers improved understanding seems logical: ‘… if the sharing of experiences provides a greater understanding of context, then it could be suggested that initially there is a need to self-reflect and record one’s thoughts and feelings’ (Hughes et al., 2009, p. 370).

This may enrich resulting conversations, for example, people who self-reflect and prepare themselves tend to shift the course of shared thinking more effectively (Stains, 2012). It also points to the need for practitioners to examine their own experience and context prior to sharing them. Facilitators may thereby model good preparation for group reflection via preliminary solitary reflection: ‘In support of this, A. Ghaye and Ghaye (1998) propose that reflective conversations may initially take the form of a private “conversation with self”, but then it should be articulated in public’ (Hughes et al., 2009, p. 370).

By thinking privately through an idea or experience it becomes easier for the individual to articulate these publicly. The resultant cross-fertilisation of well-examined ideas can result in a better collective understanding of the topic of enquiry:

It is in the midst of this vigorous cross fertilization that group members are most active, as understandings are confirmed, challenged, enlarged, or even changed. We learn from our own experience and from each other. (Hendricks et al., 1996, p. 100)

As groups of people do not always agree, there may be situations where disparate perspectives conflict. In such scenarios, a facilitator task would be to sensitively negotiate and rationalise discrepancies, using this as a learning opportunity to encourage sensitive, blame-free understanding despite differences.

Guiding divergent discussion is not easy and it is reasonable to assume some who facilitate the reflective learning process of others may be uncomfortable or ineffective in facilitating difficult conversations and it is important to remember too, that facilitators are on a learning journey themselves. Ideally, regardless of experience, all practitioners should engage in mentoring/supervisory relationships exploring and evaluating facilitatory practice. Indeed, the supervisory context can be an opportunity for experiential and transformational learning to occur (Calvert et al., 2016) through focussed conversations (Jarvis & Clark, 2020).

Strengths and limitations

Whilst these findings provide a synthesis from a broad range of theoretical and professional perspectives, they are limited to text extracted from the three databases searched. It is recognised that this study may not be exhaustive of extant literature exploring the facilitators and facilitation of reflection. Nevertheless, this study synthesises an adequate range of articles, making a meaningful contribution to understanding.

Conclusion

Positively impacting on professional practice, reflection is a relational process which draws connections between private ideas, and public interactions between individuals and groups. As a public process, reflection can be facilitated through focussed formal dialogues between peers, more experienced colleagues, and facilitators, enriching and diversifying knowledge, perspectives, insights, and relationships.

Beginning the reflective process, learners require support to encourage deconstruction of reflective concepts and processes, and grounding in the rules surrounding reflective tasks. Reflection can be difficult for those unaccustomed to the nuances inherent within the process. Wherever possible, facilitating others should be conducted by an experienced, reflective practitioner. Whatever their level of experience, an ideal facilitator will value open enquiry towards complexity, difference, and emotive responses. This requires safe, supportive, and blame-free environments where facilitators mirror qualities such as congruence, acceptance, and empathy. Given the inter and intrapersonal complexities involved in the facilitation of reflective practice, facilitators should also engage in reflective supervision to maintain a learner-centred, open, empathic, tolerant, and accepting stance whatever the differences and challenges that arise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

T. Marshall

Tony Marshall is a PhD researcher, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Accredited Strength and Conditioning Coach with the United Kingdom Strength and Conditioning Association. As a lecturer/teacher he has worked in the higher education, further education, and secondary education contexts. His research aims to understand the process of reflection and the impact that reflective practice has on the learning and development of sport coaches.

S. Keville

Dr Saskia Keville is a Registered and Chartered Clinical Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has a broad range of interests particularly focussing on understanding experiences and distress from a compassionate, accepting, tolerant or normalising perspective. She has published in areas which include carers perspectives in mental health and neurodiversity, reflective practices, and personal development in professional practice.

A. Cain

Alison Cain is Deputy Dean of the School of Life and Medical Sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. She is a sociologist of sport, with a keen interest in the potential of sport as an agent of positive social change. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is a proponent of the value of reflective practice as a developmental tool that has applications in a range of contexts.

J. R. Adler

Professor Joanna R Adler conducts research and evaluation that focus on offending impacts in real world and virtual communities. Both in her research and teaching, Joanna has adopted personal and group reflective practices to better facilitate learning and practice. A former chair of the British Psychological Society standing council for the continuing professional development of psychologists, she has been leading reflective practice and helping trainees develop into ethical practitioners, for nearly three decades.