Identifying the need for improving academic skills
A personal developmental plan constitutes activities that help a person to identify, improve and take initiative to improve their existing professional and academic skills and capabilities. This reflective process is essential as every individual should essentially acquire personal and professional skills to achieve personal and professional objectives. The reflective approach should be a mandatory action taken by every student striving to achieve their long and short-term goals. Professional development directly or indirectly is aimed at personal development. Professional development helps a student to command control, learn prioritization, exercise organizational, decision making, judgmental, and planning skills. This reflective assignment will demonstrate the progressive development of two pertinent academic skills which are referencing and understanding plagiarism and time management. I will begin discussing this assignment by outlining why I chose to create an action plan to develop these two particular academic skills and then move on to discuss the academic skills I possessed when I began the academic programme and then discuss the academic skills that I have developed over the course of my first academic year. The reflective essay will also contain a discussion on how I plan to develop these two chosen academic skills and also mention the strategies that will be used to review my progress. I have chosen the aforementioned two basic academic skills as personally I struggle with excelling at these two skills.
When I began the programme I was very hopeful and optimistic about learning a number of professional and personal skills. Before joining the course programme, I had no knowledge of referencing and plagiarism other than the knowledge of the basic types of referencing. Knowledge of referencing and plagiarism is of utmost necessity for excelling at research work. However, I knew that referenced and plagiarism-free academic work is essential in maintaining academic integrity. To my understanding, referencing allows a student to acknowledge the work of another author and research works in one’s work. I knew that every idea, theories and original content borrowed from another author should be cited. I had a limited idea about the technique used for searching peer-reviewed articles on renowned online databases like Google Scholar, or PubMed. Additionally, I knew that there is various online reference citing apps like cite this for me, Citeshare, Citationsy, etc. through the use of which references could be cited. However, I had limited knowledge about ways to use these apps for citing references. I even did not know that references of different sources are structured differently. I felt ashamed of my naivety related to academic writing skills. I began my academic journey with insufficient knowledge about academic writing. I lacked confidence in myself when the educator announced that we needed to be proficient in academic writing skills.
Time management is a process by which a person organizes and plans ways to divide time between different activities (Aeon and Aguinis 2017). It is essential to be able to manage time to remain focused on one’s short-term and long-term academic goals (Aeon and Aguinis 2017). To do so, one has to manage the 24 hours slot to optimize it as much as possible. There are several benefits of time management. Better time management leads to greater productivity and efficacy as the person gets ample time to complete daily tasks (Aeon and Aguinis 2017). Better time management leads to lesser stress as the activities are scheduled and organized leading to lower chances of engaging in procrastination. Appropriate time management skills can increase chances of advancement by creating more opportunities to achieve one’s goals. Before I joined the programme, my daily life was unstructured. I became extremely demotivated, lacking purpose or direction in life. I considered scheduling my daily routine to increase my productivity and reduce stress. I created a daily routine to organize my daily activities and ensure that the daily tasks are completed and adhered to. However, due to a lack of strategic knowledge of developing a daily schedule and techniques to keep oneself motivated, I could not maintain the routine. I went back to the vicious cycle of demotivation, procrastination, anxiety, and stress. I chose these two academic skills as I believe that I should improve my referencing skills and expertise to write an academic research paper or assignment free of plagiarism. I also wanted to improve my time management skills and enhance my ability to stick to the daily schedule.
Initial knowledge and struggles with academic writing
After joining the programme, I have created an action plan to achieve the two academic skills namely time management and skills of referencing and delivering plagiarism-free academic assignments. After following the action plan, I have been able to learn a lot about referencing. In contrast to the limited knowledge I had about referencing, now I know about some of the common referencing styles and the structure of in-text used for each type of referencing style. The referencing styles that I have learned are APA 7th edition, Harvard style, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver, IEEE, and Turabian. Now I am more confident about using appropriate and relevant referencing styles where required. I have thorough knowledge about the in-texting styles of each reference style. Furthermore, I also know which elements of an academic assignment are to be referenced. One of the salient features of a quintessential research paper is appropriate referencing and plagiarism-free work.
After I implemented the action plan I created for improving time management, I have been able to complete my assignments on time, read academic materials, include self-care in my daily routine, engage in social interactions, enjoy the leisure and improve my professional skills. Daily routine and academic scheduling has helped me mitigate stress and anxiety. I have been able to cut down maladaptive stress coping techniques like procrastination, cramming at the last moment, avoidance of studying, and over thinking. Through time management I have been able to complete my studies way before time and revise the same before examinations. I could easily handle my study pressure and balance it against my personal time.
To increase my knowledge about referencing styles and in-text, I initially contacted my supervisor and programme educator. I evaluated my baseline knowledge of referencing and ways to reduce plagiarism. On the assessment of my available referencing skills, I listed down my weak areas that required immediate attention. After I was able to develop the priority list, I rated the urgency of the need to learn the skills on a scale of 1 to 5. The more the score allocated to each goal, the higher is the priority. On the basis of the ratings, I prioritized learning the referencing structures and in-texting styles. The second priority was to learn techniques to paraphrase sentences to reduce plagiarism and my third priority was to learn ways to use academic writing enhancing tools and devices like Grammarly, EndNotes (Agrawal and Rasouli 2019), and Turnitin. To enhance my referencing, I took part in online referencing learning courses, watched tutorials on different referencing styles, downloaded templates and samples of different references, and practiced the referencing styles at home. I stayed back at the library after classes to download PDFs of articles to see how different reference styles are used in published peer-reviewed articles. I also consulted our professor when I was stuck at any part.
For time management, I have used two different popular time management techniques: Eisenhower Matrix and the Pomodoro techniques as I found these two techniques most suitable for my requirement. With the help of the Eisenhower matrix, I organized my tasks into four quadrants in the matrix. The first quadrant consisted of tasks and goals which are urgent and important hence should be done on a priority basis. I included daily activities of living, a pressing deadline, and an academic dispute in this quadrant. The second quadrant consists of tasks that are important but not urgent which is on me to decide if I should invest my time on or not. I included exercises, spending time with my friends and family members, resolving a conflict with my close ones, self-care, and ‘me-time’ in this quadrant. The third quadrant is for tasks and goals which are urgent but not important which was for me to delegate. I included household chores, buying groceries, etc. And the fourth quadrant includes tasks that are neither important nor urgent therefore these tasks are to be deleted. I included social media use, taking personal phone calls, wasting time, and procrastinating.
Importance of time management
Additionally, I used the Pomodoro technique to complete each task that I identified as urgent and important. The steps I followed is listed down the tasks that I have to complete in a day based on the priority. I attended to the prioritized task and set a timer for myself to complete it. I trained my mind to focus on the timed work at hand and defocus from other tasks listed. I completed the task at hand and put a checkmark on the piece of paper. After the task is completed, I took a short break for 3-5 minutes like stretching my body, viewing nature from the window or grabbing a cup of coffee, etc. Once one task is completed, I moved on to the next task and repeated the steps.
I have used positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment to motivate myself in sticking to the daily routine and study schedule I created to manage my time. My close peers and my sibling has played pivotal roles in verbally motivating me and keeping me focused on my routine. These self-motivational, self-determining, and self-regulatory actions have been further enhanced by my supervisors and tutors. I had informed my peers and my sibling about the daily routine that I developed and asked them to motivate me every time they witnessed me diverting from the daily routine. This put the onus of the schedule on me, increased my accountability and responsibilities towards abiding by the routine.
I used multiple techniques to review my progress. The first technique was to get my referencing skills graded and corrected by my professor. The grading helped me recognize my areas of weakness and modify my short term goals accordingly. I practiced paraphrasing and checked my paraphrased content using Turnitin tools. The similarity percentage provided me with the feedback of how well I had paraphrased the content. I took online referencing tests and reviewed the score I made. I also took my classmates feedbacks on my referencing skills and wrote my assignment papers and manually completed the reference list without using any software like EndNotes.
To reviewed my progress on my time management skills by keeping track of the amount of time I spent daily on social media. Then I calculated the average amount of time I spent on social media every day to see if I could track a trend of my social media usage. I noticed that my social media usage increased on weekends, during the night time and when I was under academic stress. Additionally, I kept a daily track of the days that I adequately followed the Pomodoro technique and the days that I could not. Afterward, I calculated the frequency of adherence to the routine to the frequency of non-adherence. I realized that in the first month, my frequency of non-adherence was more than the frequency of adherence. Due to this, I introduced a new time management technique to Pareto analysis. I realized that this new technique was more in alignment with my anxious, hyperactive, and impulsive personality as it helped me analyze the barriers to my goals and address the barriers accordingly before completing the tasks. By using this technique, I could easily identify the root cause of my issues and solve them in due course.
Creating an action plan to develop academic skills
This development plan was indeed very helpful for me as it helped me recognize my strengths and my weaknesses. I feel more confident about writing academic papers now that I have knowledge about various referencing styles. I could also analyze the action plans that would best suit my personality. Since I implemented the action plan, I have been able to considerably develop my academic skills and better handle my daily activities.
Introduction
Reflection can be described as the overall process by the help of which certain experiences are being shared down in order to learn and evolve more from the eyes of being the practitioner. This will be further stated with the help of clinical supervision that is to be guided for all the adults. From the personal and professional development-based attributes which I have stated down here, I would like to consider the fact that reflection procedure would help me a lot in evolving throughout the fields of professional engagement and this would involve the description, feelings and analysis in the entire procedure that I will be using here with (Cable and Graham 2018). Thus, in this assignment, I am going to discuss about the older clinical supervision that I have been laid into with the incorporation of a reflective framework. For the sake of anonymity, however, the name and personal details won’t be shared and the person will be referred to a patient (Solbakken et al. 2018). This would help me a lot in getting the sense of humor for understanding the situation and this would also help in understanding the areas where I am lagging in the fields of learning and development (Murray, Sundin and Cope 2018). Support from others will also be emphasized down here which helped me a lot in getting through clinical supervision process. Gibbs Reflective Framework will be used in this context.
Geriatric nursing practice or adult nursing practice for all the older aged patients is being designed in order to understand the practices that can be manifested with primary care by nurses like me. Clinical supervision involves taking care of all the physical and mental healthcare needs that are required by the patient (Falender 2018). When I was placed in the second year of nursing placement, I was given the duty to take care of a person who was 65-year-old who was suffering from dementia and was admitted to the hospital after a fall case scenario happened with him the previous week. Due to the ethical constraints and keeping in mind, the legal considerations of the United Kingdom, I am not disclosing the name of the patient due to major confidentiality issues. However, I would like to state that this person is from the western skirts of the country and I was being provisioned to give him the basic guidance and care so that optimal outcomes can be guaranteed. I have used all the knowledge and experiences that I have gained through the years in order to take care of the patient (Snowdon et al., 2020). By going through his reports, I came to know that he is having the 2-year old repetitive history of forgetfulness, memory loss and executive functional losses were also being observed. He is retired since the age of 48 and mild cortical atrophy was found. After the fall case scenario happened, he lost his ability to walk due to the severe pain he got in his right leg. Wheelchair movements were being imposed down to him in order to walk. Because of the symptoms that are being observed in him, I got to know that since the activities of daily living life were restricted to him previously, he started having the cognitive challenges with his relation to work. Some of the examples of functional losses that I have observed in him are the things that word findings and literacy skills were quite deteriorated.
Improving referencing skills
At the first instance, I was very much worried since this was the first time, I was given the full in-charge duty of a patient. Then, somehow, I succumbed my anxiety at a separate place and I started taking down the matter under considerable action. I improvised all the type of clinical supervision skills on him so that he can get better soon. I have the feeling of becoming accustomed to him on the very first day so that I am able to understand his query or other concerns that were being raised to him. Firstly, I have used the mini mental status examination (MSE) on him in order to understand the cognitive, presentation and other considerations. To my knowledge, I have calculated that his score was 18 out of 30 which indicated that he is having the cognitive impairment. None of the post evening meals are being consumed by him and he is found to be experiencing some of the extreme difficulties while finding out some of the directions when I instructed him to walk down through the corridor. I have got the feelings of dealing with him in a calm manner so that I can help him down with all the care considerations. I have taken some of the simple actions so that I can ensure that people suffering with dementia are known to take some of the personal effects such as hearing aids and glasses down by the hospital. I have taken myself part in various conversations with him so that I can help him in maximizing his orientation and personal choices. To my sudden surprise, within a week, I found that the patient was recovering and he was able to memorize the little things such as what are the foods that are taken by him and when was the last meal offered to him. Along with that, slow and mild walking practices were being done by him especially during the morning time, though, in the initial days, little assisted supports were given to him by me (Zahirovic et al. 2018). After seeing this mild outcomes from the patient I was looking into, I felt very much happy and overwhelmed that my nursing educational practice were coming into existence. Besides that, I also gave him interventions of how to walk since the pain in his right leg was persistent. I have given the pain management interventions so that he can stride along without hesitation. This was only possible since I have applied all the field of evidence based resources that was being taught to me in my academic nursing-oriented classes.
Evaluation of the outcomes were entailed by using some of the regulatory guidelines of my clinical supervision that I am reflecting here into. Being the clinical supervisor, I took care of all the cognitive and the neurological tests which I performed on him for each consecutive day. With the help of these tests, I assessed all the thinking and the physical functioning of the patient I was looking for. Neurological brain scans were being performed by me so that the position of amygdala regions in the brain along with the neural impulses of the motor sensors can be understood by me. This would also help me in understanding the neural cognition activity of his brain (Hwang and Park 2020). Along with that, while taking care of the patient who is suffering with dementia, I also evaluated his communication pattern with other people and his family members. I personally checked through all the medical reports especially of the Hippocampus regions which is important for learning and memory related purposes (Blytt et al. 2018). Progress notes along with the important documentation were used off by me at every instant in order to progress all the important outcomes.
Enhancing time management skills
Other than that, I have impregnated the communication strategy as a part of my clinical supervision skill. This is because, I personally felt like communication forms an important part of patient care specially for those who are suffering from the mental trauma disorders or are suffering from wider range of health issues. I have myself used some of the verbal as well as the non-verbal means of communication in order to get adhered with the patient. Use of gestures, facial expressions along with some of the notifiable means of using pen-paper has helped me a lot in understanding his queries and concerns (Rikos et al. 2018). Thus, with concern to that, I personally feel like clinical leadership is very much needed for understanding the potential impact on the clinical practice along with the clinical practice care environments. This would help in contributing the equitable safe and quality-oriented patient care so that patient satisfaction along with retention of nurses like me can get enhanced subsequently.
Evaluation was preceded down with me when I understood that a lot of the impregnated nursing skills were consistent with the evidence-based research and I am utterly grateful for the nursing society who have given me the opportunity to take down this role for being the adult nursing supervisor (Li et al. 2020). It is something I will keep on practicing throughout my entire nursing career and I will take down all the important approaches so that the best decision making can be opted by me. I believed in strengthening my own reflection and interests which I have witnessed here. This is something I will keep ensuring till the future interests of my life get proclaimed within. The therapeutic model of approach can be perceived to be very much helpful since this would help in establishing the rapport proclamation of trust and empathy that I have believe should exist in between the nurses like me and the patients.
In order to enhance the understanding of dementia and other mental health related disorders which are found in the older aged patients, I will finish some of the online trainings in order to understand the condition more efficiently and I would learn to know what are the best practice guidelines that I should follow into so that optimal results can be observed. I personally feel like that with the up gradation of my career, it will also help me in becoming more experienced for being a nurse. Difficult cases can arise again in the future day scenario where I should ensure that I would keep continuing the online training within the next four weeks of placement (Ardian, Hariyati and Afifah 2019). The certification will help me in understanding the proofs that are to be given with the overall consideration of increasing the Professional Development-based Practices. I would further learn to negotiate more with the patients since this would help me in understanding their other diseased conditions (if they are facing any) and I would learn to get adapted to have some of the basic care in order to assess the learning needs of the patient.
Strategies for reviewing progress
In the final part of reflective cycle, I would like to state that all the nurses like me should focus more on clinical adult leadership. I have learned to get persuaded with the notion that it is very much essential for taking care of the old aged patients especially who are having severe impairments in communicating well and this would help in highlighting the provision of care. This gets influenced by some of the personal attitudes along with the care-delivery beliefs.
Conclusion
Thus, from the above-stated summary, it can be concluded that with the help of such clinical advisory placement, my overall nursing skill got stronger. The expertise issues that I have faced within are very much common which I have solved all by my own and more than that, the use of Gibbs Reflective Cycle Framework that I have used within this context served a lot in the prior decision-making framework. The evaluation has helped me lot in focusing more on the priorities of the patient accordingly. With the help of this paper, all the health aspects of the patient are being guided down with proper care and I have learned to believe that important health outcomes can be observed when the patient is treated right with diligent care and respect. The treatment of dementia patient in the hospital setting where I was working as a nurse helped me in getting the fruitful impact on my overall professional and personal knowledge-based development and guidance. I have used all the personalized means of knowledge and respect to the provision of taking care of this patient so that I can understand where are the areas of development which I require in order to further progress down in my career.
References
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