Reflective practice and learning from mistakes in social work student placement

Student placement is a fundamental component of social work education and an important space where to build critically self-reflective practitioners. Students learn from their reflection on their experience and their mistakes are a powerful opportunity to go behind the surface of events and understand the essence of the profession. This article will present some results from the analysis carried out on the reflective writing of a group of social work students who describe and reflect on the most significant mistakes they made in their field practice using a reflective framework developed for errors and failures. The main results of this experience are illustrated with special focus on the impact and on the emotions, the relationships with service users and the assessment of the cases. Students are often so concentrated on looking at their responsibility that they become almost blind to the systems and interactions that contribute to the negative outcomes of their actions. Social work education programs should emphasize the importance of structured reflective habits and promote the culture of responsibility instead of the ‘blame culture’, that is probably the strongest obstacle to learning from mistakes and preventing their repetition in the future.