‘Oh yes, that is also reflection’—Using discursive psychology to describe how GP registrars construct reflection

Introduction

Learners in medical education generally perceive that reflection is important, but they also find that reflection is not always valuable or practically applicable. We address the gap between the potential benefits of reflection and its practical implementation in medical education. We examined the perspective of Dutch GP registrars who (must) reflect for their GP specialty training to understand their participant perspective on reflection. Our aim is stimulating alignment between reflective activities that occur in a medical curriculum and the ideals of reflection as a valuable educational activity.

Methods

We conducted, video-recorded and transcribed seven focus group sessions with GP registrars in 2021 across two Dutch GP educational programmes. We used discursive psychology to analyse the focus group data by focusing on ‘assessments of reflection’. We analysed their discursive features (how something was said) and content features (what was said) and related these to each other to understand how GP registrars construct reflection.

Results

Participants constructed reflection with nuance; they combined negative and positive assessments that displayed varied orientations to reflection. First, their combined assessments showed complex orientations to norms and experiences with reflecting in practice and that these are not simply negative or positive. Second, GP registrars constructed reflection as a negotiable topic and showed how reflection and its value can be variably understood. Third, through combined assessments, they displayed an orientation to the integration of reflection with other educational tasks, which impacts its value.

Conclusions

Generally, GP registrars speak positively about reflection, but the value of reflection partly depends on its proper integration with other educational tasks. When meaningful integration fails, activities to stimulate reflection can overshoot their own goal and hamper learner motivation to reflect. Developing a healthy ‘reflection culture’ could mitigate some challenges. Therein, reflection is treated as important while learners also have adequate autonomy.