Reflective Framework and Learning from Mistakes in Social Work Internship

Social work internship for students takes the value of a training experience that is absolutely needed for the building of competent practitioners. So students not only come in direct contact with social services, but, under the supervision of competent practitioners, they also carry out different forms of professional actions in a proper environment. Some errors are inevitable but should put on alert on the consequent responsibility because of the risk of damaging service users. However, these mistakes are also valuable learning opportunities. This is true, though in a different form, for both the trainee novice and the experienced worker. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate some strategies that can be used individually or within working groups for learning from mistakes. In particular, the Gibbs’s reflective cycle is an effective and easy tool for developing reflective practice habits. It is made by more than 50 questions aimed at conducting in-depth reflection on factual details, emotions, positive and negative consequences of an experience so to facilitate students to answer final questions like: What sense can you make of the situation? What else could you have done? If it arouse again what would you do? This reflective tool has been used by the social work students of the Bachelor in Social Work at the University of Calabria, Italy, and the main results of this experience will be illustrated with special focus on the learning outcomes students declare in their reflective writings in field such as methods and techniques of social work, relationship with service users, dealing with emotions, learning how to learn and others. This is important to develop reflective practitioners who are aware that, as Dewey (1910) said, “we do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience”.