Commentary: Embedding reflective practice in competency development to provide learner-centred feedback

Summary

Armstrong and Sherwood (2026) make a compelling case that reflective practice and competency-based education are natural pedagogical partners. Their shared commitments to holistic learning, iterative growth and the bridging of theory and practice create what the authors describe as an opportunity to develop ‘habits of the mind’ that sustain clinicians across a lifetime of practice. The paper organises its argument around three temporal dimensions of reflection: reflecting before action (pre-briefing, planning and intention-setting), reflecting in action (real-time awareness and adjustment) and reflecting on action (debriefing, sense-making and retrospective analysis). Each dimension is accompanied by practical tools such as Ask-Tell-Ask, SBAR, CUS and structured debriefing prompts that nurse educators can readily integrate across simulation, clinical and classroom settings. Importantly, the authors frame these not as discrete choices but as interconnected processes that together build the self-awareness and situational fluency that characterise practice-ready graduates.

Connection to nursing theory, practice and research

What strikes me most about this paper is not its novelty but its coherence. The three-dimensional model of reflective practice that Armstrong and Sherwood (2026) advances resonates deeply with Watson’s Theory of Human Caring and the broader Unitary Caring Science framework, which understands learning, like caring, as a relational ontological process (Watson, 2018). The paper’s emphasis on co-producing learning with learners rather than for them reflects a fundamentally caritas-informed pedagogy: one in which the educator’s role is not to deposit knowledge but to accompany the learner into increasingly deep self-awareness.

This resonance is not incidental. Caring Science has long insisted that the inner life of the practitioner matters that self-knowing is not separate from clinical competence but is its very foundation. Armstrong and Sherwood (2026) give this claim a practical architecture. When the authors describe reflection before action as providing ‘time and space for developing grounded awareness’, they are naming something that contemplative traditions, and Caring Science scholarship, have understood for decades: that stillness and intentionality before engagement shape the quality of presence one brings to practice.

The paper’s treatment of reflection in action deserves particular attention for its honest reckoning with complexity. Schön’s (1983) concept of professional artistry – the capacity to improvise thoughtfully in the midst of uncertainty – is not easily taught, and the authors do not pretend otherwise. This challenge is taken up in depth in the nursing literature as well (Horton-Deutsch and Sherwood, 2024).Yet they offer something valuable: a vocabulary and a set of practices (Observe–Breathe–Reflect–Speak; TeamSTEPPS and the mindful pause) that create conditions in which reflective agility can be cultivated over time. In my own work with RN-MSN students and Caritas Coaches and Leaders in an academic–practice partnership, I have observed that this in-action reflective capacity often emerges most visibly when learners feel psychologically safe – when the educational culture has normalised inquiry, uncertainty and productive discomfort as features rather than failures of professional development.

The authors’ attention to interprofessional dimensions of reflective practice is also notable. As they observe, no single health profession ‘owns’ reflective practice – and this is precisely its power as a shared pedagogical language across disciplines. For example, Ignatian pedagogy, which animates nursing education in Jesuit institutions, shares this conviction: the Examen, as a structured practice of noticing and discernment, is itself a form of reflection before, in, and on action that has been cultivated across centuries and contexts. The convergence of these traditions – Caring Science, Ignatian pedagogy and the reflective practice literature – points towards a richer, more integrative model of health professions education than any single framework alone can offer. Readers are encouraged to integrate their own organisational values, missions and traditions into the reflective practice frameworks offered here, as it is precisely this kind of rootedness – in mission, in relationship and in shared ethical commitment – that transforms reflective practice from a pedagogical technique into a way of being in practice.

Practical implications

The most immediate beneficiaries of this paper are nurse educators across all settings including academic and clinical, pre-licensure and graduate. The practical tools offered are genuinely useful, and their grounding in evidence strengthens their credibility. Simulation faculty, clinical preceptors and curriculum designers will find the organisational framework of before/in/on action immediately applicable to their work.

For nursing education leaders, however, the paper’s deeper implication may be institutional: embedding reflective practice as a curricular thread requires more than adding reflective prompts to existing assignments. It requires cultivating a culture of inquiry, one in which educators themselves engage in ongoing reflective practice, model vulnerability and growth and understand feedback as a relational act. Faculty development is therefore as important as curriculum redesign. When educators internalise the habits of mind they are seeking to instil in learners, the pedagogical environment shifts in ways that cannot be reduced to tools and tables alone.

For students and clinically practicing nurses, the paper offers reassurance: the discomfort of not-yet-knowing is not a deficit but a portal. Reflective practice, consistently engaged, transforms that discomfort into insight – and insight, over time, into wisdom. In a healthcare environment of escalating complexity and moral demand, this capacity may be among the most essential we can cultivate.

Armstrong and Sherwood (2026) have offered the field a thoughtful, well-organised and practically generative contribution. Its integration of pedagogical theory, assessment frameworks and clinical tools positions it as a resource that will serve nurse educators well, and, through them, the patients and communities who benefit from practitioners who know not only what they do, but who they are.