Donna Frost

Facilitation of the development of professional artistry 221 7 collective dialogue and reflection. Practically, we began by clarifying our present understandings of professional artistry and where we expected or hoped to demonstrate it in our practice. We shared with each other our own visions for ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ care and explored to what extent our ideas about good or excellent care included aspects of professional artistry, for as far as our understandings reached at that time. We also explored how it felt to us as practitioners to meet our goals in this: what did this kind of practice look and feel like to us? How could we identify such moments? For example, we shared with each other those aspects of our practice that we would like, or wouldn’t mind, others emulating. This was new for everyone and turned out to be a particularly useful question. No-one has ever asked me that before. The aspects of my work that I think are an example for someone else. It really makes you think. […] And now the pressure is on because you are here watching me. Ha. I guess I watched you too! […] It has really made me think, that question. And it is a good question. I am going to ask the students next time I think. […] Working today together with you, we have a lot to be proud of, a lot that other people could emulate. It made me proud. (Jane-CRC- 20120819 -pp 1 , 3 , 9 - 10 ). These activities helped prepare and prime us to recognise those kinds of moments within our practice from our perspective. Further, we considered how we could know how others’ experienced our professional practice and in what ways they weighed and judged our practice. We discussed and agreed on ways of gaining insight into the perspectives of others about our practice, for example patients, their family members, our colleagues and students. We then supported each other in collecting this data. When presenting and collaboratively reflecting on the data we had collected in practice we paid attention to how it felt to engage with our practice in this way and to ask others to give us this kind of feedback, as well as how it felt, of course, to engage with the feedback. We paid attention to the positive aspects of the experience but also to the uncertainty and other unexpected feelings that occurred. A number of us were surprised at the level of uncertainty that the beginning stages of the inquiry seemed to create. Being explicit about this helped us work through it, understand it and place it in a wider context. As well, we came to recognise the uncertainty and feeling like we wanted to perhaps not dig any deeper as a possible sign that ‘something interesting’ was happening (see Figure 7 . 4 ).