A model of personal professional development in the systematic training of clinical psychologists

Abstract

Abstract Staff development has been identified as a key way to improve the delivery of psychological therapies, particularly through enhancing professionals' capacity for reflective practice. Traditionally, the ‘reflective practitioner’ model has guided how we train professionals to deliver therapies, but this model is vague and needs refinement. We therefore outlined a more coherent model, by integrating the ideas and methods of these and other educationalists into our working definition of the ‘Personal Professional Development’ (PPD). We proposed that reflection can be made explicit within a circumplex model that is based upon an experiential learning cycle. This allowed ‘reflective practice’ to be developed systematically and analyzed empirically. We detailed how PPD is addressed within one clinical psychology training program, and provided some initial, promising evaluation data to support the approach. The need for further development and evaluation of our model and its associated methods is discussed as an appropriately reflexive next phase. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.