Reflective Practice 3.0: Creating a Culture of Curiosity

NASW Vermont Chapter

Thursday, January 15, 2026
2:45 - 4pm EST
Social Workers have a long tradition of emphasizing the importance of Reflective Practice as both a professional responsibility and a safeguard for providing equitable services to our clients. An unexamined professional easily falls prey to the common pitfalls of clinical practice—externalizing blame, over-surveilling our clients, becoming reactive, helpless and hopeless, and implementing harmful interventions without due diligence to our own biases. We are obligated to ask regularly, “Who benefits when we do not have the time to reflect?”Reflective Practice requires consistent effort to direct our curiosity and inquiry inwardly, for the purposes of improving our practice, moderating our stress, revealing blind spots, and building equitable systems of care. Anyone who works in the human services fields knows that we are required to hold an enormous amount of pain, both our clients as well as our own. To hold this pain requires intentional individual and organizational commitment to Reflective Practice.In this workshop we will discuss three useful and practical frameworks for understanding and implementing Reflective Practice (both individually and organizationally). These three frameworks—attachment theory, the Johari Window and the “4E Protocol”—will help us revitalize efforts at Reflective Practice, while equipping us with specific practice tools. We will also be provided with a list of ‘gold standard’ questions that have both immediate and generalized utility across many different practice settings. This workshop is appropriate for those social workers who work in all types of settings, from agency work to private practice.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define Reflective Practice and explain its significance as a professional responsibility and ethical imperative in social work and human services.
2. Identify the risks and consequences of neglecting reflection in clinical and organizational settings, including increased bias, reactivity, burnout, and inequitable service delivery.
3. Explore and apply three core frameworks—attachment theory, the Johari Window, and the 4E Protocol—to support ongoing personal and organizational reflective practice.
4. Analyze the impact of unprocessed emotional labor in human services work and understand the role Reflective Practice plays in holding and managing both client and practitioner pain.
5. Utilize a set of “gold standard” reflective questions to enhance self-awareness, uncover blind spots, and improve clinical judgment and intervention.