The growth of management connoisseurship through reflective practice

Reflective practice offers a way to structure learning within supervision by paying attention to aspects of practice within reflected experiences, in such ways that the issues can be identified, understood, and worked through to resolve contradictions between desired outcomes and actual practice. In this process, emerging personal knowledge of practice is juxtaposed with relevant theory in such a way that the manager is able to meaningfully assimilate theory into his or her practice as appropriate. This paper illustrates how an H-grade unit nurse manager identified a number of situational management issues through reflecting and sharing experiences in a group clinical supervision milieu (over a period of 15 weeks). Clinical supervision is being advocated as a means to ensure practitioner development of effective practice (Vision for the Future, Department of Health 1993).