Reflective Practice

“We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

Thank-you to Monica Kales for sharing her expertise in this important area!

It’s hard for mediators to know if we’re doing a good job, particularly if we come away feeling puzzled, confused or inadequate. Settlement rates don’t always tell the story.

Reflective Practice is essentially a mindset, a commitment to understanding why we make the choices we make in mediation in any given moment; not an evaluation, analysis or recap of what was done well or what could have been done better. It requires viewing every mediation as a unique opportunity to learn and hone mediator effectiveness. Genuine curiosity about oneself and the parties as well as heightened self-awareness are imperative to the mindset.

Susan Terry developed a process for all mediators to experience reflective debriefing. She has put the process into a process and captured it in a format she has shared. NMC highly recommends all mediators, coaches and trainers, no matter your level of experience, take on some kind of reflective practice.

That document - The Reflective Debriefing Process - can be found here.

In order to prevent complacency, being open to developing the reflective practice mindset is essential. Once the intense learning phase of any new activity is past and one feels more ease in the activity, it can be tempting to become complacent in the application of the process – akin to reaching the unconscious competence stage of the ladder of competence.

While useful in some activities, unconscious competence is not an ideal place to rest for a mediator committed to life-long learning.

In Reflective Debrief, the presenting practitioner can briefly describe the mediation situation and is encouraged to share something from the session that might be surprising, confusing, awkward. The questioner ideally asks questions that support and encourage self-reflection, bringing curiosity rather than investigation or evaluation.

*Adapted from the work of Michael Lang and Susan Terry