Reflective Practice Support Groups for interpreters - Why? What? How?

Reflective practice groups facilitate deep reflection on professional experiences, promoting self-care and reducing occupational stress, while helping practitioners maintain their professional standards. Participants share their dilemmas, successes, and challenges, fostering an environment of shared learning and supportive collaboration. Reflective practice helps us to make good decisions in the moment. Schön (1983) calls this ‘reflection-in-action’.

In this session we will briefly remind ourselves of the research findings which recommend support for interpreters, what form reflective practice support can take and how it is delivered. The first part of the session will consider the why and the what.

The second part of the session will be an illustration of the how by observing a part of a Reflective Practice Support Group session. A commentary on the illustration is then provided and there is an opportunity for questions.

This two-hour session will:

• Give a brief rationale for reflective practice support in groups;
• Provide a description of reflective practice support and a comparison with clinical supervision;
• Give examples of the reflective practice group process

About the speaker

After qualifying as a psychotherapist, Dr Beverley Costa set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters, in 2010 she established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum and founded The Pásalo Project in 2017 to disseminate learning from Mothertongue.

Beverley has trained over 5,000 psychological and speech and language therapists and social workers, for NHS and statutory services and NGOs, in working therapeutically across languages and with spoken language interpreters since 2013.

She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Arts and Communication Design at the University of Reading.

She runs Reflective Practice Support groups for interpreters, psychological therapists and counsellors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and psychosocial workers. She has developed an introductory course to train interpreters in facilitation skills for Reflective Practice Groups. This course has been delivered online and in-person to interpreters in organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and for the Federal Public Health Service in Belgium.

Beverley is the author of

Host or Publisher Association of Interpreters and Translators (AIT)