Becoming a Reflective Practitioner, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 5Framing Insights

Christopher Johns

Introduction

As I noted in Chapter 4, whilst working through the MSR cues, the practitioner is mindful of drawing tentative insights prompted by the MSR cue – ‘What tentative insights do I draw from this experience?’ Insights are learning that change the practitioner in some way through understanding, feelings, and actions towards realising their vision as a lived reality.

Insights are tentative because the practitioner may be uncertain of their substance. Insights can be at the level of understanding, feelings, attitudes, and action. They may not necessarily be new, but a reinforcement of things already known or sensed to some degree but now lifted into mind.

Insights are not necessarily easy to pinpoint. Indeed, the practitioner may not recognise them as such. As we shall see, they may only become evident through guidance. The challenge is to penetrate ‘beyond what is superficial or obvious’ (Carson 2008).

It may be helpful to view drawing insights as a kind of creative play.

Okri (1997, p. 21) writes:

Creativity, it would appear, should be approached in the spirit of play, of foreplay, of dalliance, doodling, messing around ‐ and then, bit by bit, you somehow get deeper into the matter. But if you go in there with a businessman’s solemnity or the fanaticism of some artistic types you are likely to be rewarded with a stiff response, a joyless dribble, strained originality, ideas that come out all strapped up and strangled by too ...