Study finds group reflective practice beneficial to planning commissions, staff, yet rarely used

LAWRENCE — Sometimes the most valuable thing you can find is something you weren’t even looking for.

In a study examining ways to improve staff reports for planning commissioners, a University of Kansas researcher found a need for group reflective practice among planning commissioners and their staff.

Planning commissions are made up of citizens appointed by elected officials to advise how best to steward critical local resources, such as land, historic properties and housing. 

Staff reports are written by public servants, such as city planners and public administrators, providing background information and legal and policy guidance to help appointed and elected officials make decisions.

Bonnie Johnson, professor of public affairs & administration at KU, initiated a study to see how staff reports could be reenvisioned. While doing so, respondents from planning commissions across the United States revealed they greatly benefited from simply discussing why such reports are written the way they are and why planning commissions function the way they do.

The study started as a way to better understand what planners do to in turn educate future planners, Johnson said. That began as “manufacturing surprise” by reimagining staff reports and what they could be.

“The idea was, ‘What if we made these reports wacky and avant-garde, just to reset our brains on what they can be?’ This could be a way of discovering unexpected strategies and more engaging for the general public. Just a way to make them more useful,” Johnson said.

For the study, Johnson worked with eight planning commissions. While the term avant-garde is often associated with art and fashion that strays from normal conventions, for the study, it was imagined as trying something new and forward-thinking. Planning commissioners and staffers were asked their thoughts on reports produced as an e-book, as a video, as newsletters and in several other formats different from the standard template — even a collage and mobile.

While opinions varied on the alternate formats in focus groups, Johnson noticed planning commissioners and staffers greatly benefited from and enjoyed talking with one another about their work.

“What I captured was a need and desire among planning commissioners to have discussions about what they do and why they do things a certain way,” Johnson said. “There were things the planning staff thought the commissioners knew but didn’t. There were things the staff did that their commissioners liked, which staff did not realize. Often planning commissioners receive some initial training, sometimes years before, and then on-the-job learning is assumed. Just asking about these wacky staff reports created pathways to have larger discussions that were learning opportunities for everyone.”

The study was published in the Journal of the American Planning Association and is open access.

In higher education, the idea of reflective practice is common, according to Johnson. It holds that a person learns a difficult profession by combining the things they learned in school with their experiences on the job. As things go right or wrong, a person reflects on those experiences and hones their work. In some fields, colleagues routinely take time to discuss what happened and how improvements could be made together in the future.

“That’s how, over time, you get really good at your profession,” Johnson said of reflective practice. “But the problem is that often it is self-reflection, which is just you by yourself. It’s common with teachers, nurses or social workers to do group reflection. That isn’t commonly taught when we train planners. With my avant-garde staff reports, I found the value of group reflective practice for planners, even though it wasn’t what I was looking for.”

The focus groups routinely expressed the value to discuss and reflect on what they were doing and how they could better serve the public, including in situations that could involve heated feedback from the public and pressure on officials to move quickly. That indicates the value of including group reflective planning as part of the education not only for future planners, but for all public administrators and elected and appointed officials, Johnson wrote.

“By manufacturing surprise as part of the study, we saw there are things we can do better with staff reports to make them a teaching tool and not just assume people know why we do things a certain way,” Johnson said. “But the big finding was we just need to stop every now and then and talk about our work. Instead of just self-reflection, we need group reflective practice. And I think we can translate that from research to better practice by making it part of planners’ education and part of regular training of those appointed to advisory boards like planning commissioners.”