Individual and Collaborative Reflection at Work: Support for Work-place Learning in Healthcare

One approach to integrate CSCL in the workplace is the support of collaboratively reflecting on work, aiming at developing and evaluating tools that support reflection at the workplace. As an example, we describe the “Talk Reflection App” and its evaluation. On a conceptual level we show the relevance of articulation, shared artifacts, and the strong interrelation between individual and collaborative activities. On the empirical level we give examples of learning outcomes. Introduction: Learning at the Workplace by Collaborative Reflection A large part of (life long) learning happens informally at the workplace. Reflecting on one’s own or on others’ behavior is a typical mechanism of learning at the workplace (e.g., Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985). In this paper, using the case of reflection in a hospital ward, we present an analysis of and socio-technical solution for (collaborative) reflection and learning. The example of the “Talk Reflection App” for collaborative reflection in hospitals demonstrates how methods and concepts of CSCL can be successfully transferred to workplaces. In its essence, reflection helps to transform daily work experience into learning (Boud et al., 1985; Daudelin, 1996; Knipfer, Wessel, & Cress, 2013). Through reflection, people step back from an experience and explore it in order to come to new insights. Reflection can be initiated when some change or problem requires work practices to be adjusted. It involves a re-evaluation of the situation with a focus on the situation and affective reactions to it. Reflection is not just individual but has multiple levels: Actors of reflection can be individuals, teams or organizations. Individuals can reflect about own experiences and about experiences made in a team or an organization. Likewise, groups can reflect on individual or group behavior. The processes of collaborative reflection can be well described with models about collaborative learning (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008; Herrmann, 2003; Stahl, 2006), which intertwine individual information processing and re-evaluation of understanding with shared understanding and negotiation of meaning in groups. By a process of inference and abstraction, new insights, learning outcomes and changes in behavior can emerge on individual and group levels (Kimmerle, Cress, & Held, 2010; Knipfer et al., 2013). Technical support for reflective learning has only been explored intensively in the context of education. A major aspect of this work is support for the externalization of experiences by structured communication (Baker & Lund, 1997), note-taking (Kim & Lee, 2002), drawing visualizations (Lin, Hmelo, Kinzer, & Secules, 1999) or tracking one’s own learning history (Scott, 2010). This shows that for collaborative reflection experiences need to be articulated (Bannon & Schmidt, 1992), shared with others, and that other people need to refer to them. However, in the context of learning at work, which happens mainly informally (Eraut, 2004) and cannot rely on upfront preparation (Prilla, Herrmann, & Degeling, 2013), such support has not been widely researched. Besides support for specific situations like project debriefings (e.g., Boud et al., 1985), research mainly proposes tools such as learning journals and portfolios to externalize experiences (e.g., Scott, 2010). In a current project (http://www.mirror-project.eu/) tools are developed to collect and reflect on information about work experiences in several formats, including input on specific experiences in a diary format and ratings on mood during an experience. This information can then be shared and used by its authors and other as a “mirror” to reflect upon own or others’ work experiences. Prior studies show that supporting tools should address four different kinds of articulation, forming a reflection cycle (Prilla, Degeling, & Herrmann, 2012): the externalization of experiences, of individual and collaborative reflection, and of outcomes of reflection (Figure 1).