Reflective Writing

What is Reflective Writing?

Reflective writing is something that students are more and more frequently being asked to
participate in as part of their degree programme, or following work placements. It is often
an unfamiliar form of writing, which can be quite challenging.

In essence, reflective writing is an opportunity to demonstrate how you have gained

experience and skills, or improved your practice, to your tutors (or others) by analysing
specific events and actions you have been part of and using these to demonstrate that you
are aware of your own personal development. This not only allows you to reflect on what
you have done, but also to make informed decisions about how you will continue to
develop. It also really helps to have this skill of reflection when it comes to CV writing and
interviews!

How does Reflective Writing differ from normal academic writing? What is expected of
me?

You have probably been told (possibly more than once) that you should never use ‘I’ in an
academic essay. Reflective writing is different, as it expects you to reflect directly on your
own personal experience, and so you will use personal pronouns and explain what you have
done in detail. A reflective essay will want to know about your actions, and also your
subjective thoughts and feelings about any situations you found yourself in, which is quite
different from the purely objective and distanced writing that normal academic assessments
expect from you.

However, this does not meant that a reflective essay or learning log should just be a long
description of simply what you did and what you felt about it. As the aim of reflective
writing is to encourage you to look objectively at your actions/feelings and think about what
you learnt from it, you will need to think critically about what caused the situation and what
you could have done to improve your performance. This can be quite a difficult, and even
uncomfortable, process and requires a great deal of honesty about things that might not
have gone so well. The great thing about reflective writing is that even if an event during
your placement did not work in practice, it is how you think and move on from it which is
important in the assessment!

Your degree and your placement/project are not divorced from your degree programme.
This may be in terms of the knowledge you may have gained (and testing how this works in
practice), putting the employability skills which study has given you to the test and also
utilising the critical thinking skills you have gained to assess your own performance. The
hardest thing about reflective writing is often turning these critical modes of thinking on
you!

While these are the general aims of reflective writing, there may be specific aims to any
assessment depending on the module or part of the degree programme that you need to
consider. Some reflective writing may want you to look at specific incidents, concentrate on
linking theory to your practice or concentrate on identifying areas which you need to work
and come up with a plan of action.

Types of Reflective Writing/Assessment

There is no one set assessment for reflective writing. The assessment may be worth part of
your module, or feed into another assessment that does, or simply be something which you
have to complete. It may take the form of several other different types of assessment which
you are already used to. In this case, you need to be careful not to turn it into a ‘watered-
down’ version of one of these. Some examples might include:

Learning Logs/Journals

Learning logs/journals can be used in different ways. Sometimes they may be a formal part
of your assessment, or sometimes they may form the basis of a later reflective assignment.
The aim of a learning log/journal is partly to reflect on events and your actions as they
happen, but also to chart your development as you learn.

Sometimes learning logs are stand-alone pieces of work. In this case, you need to be careful
to put all of the details into your learning log, and make it clear for your marker what the
outcomes of the learning experience were, as well as the actual events. Also, if these
learning logs are going to be handed in, do not forget they are a piece of assessment and
make sure you use appropriate language.

Some learning logs may be more for your own benefit or to inform a later piece of reflective
assessment. In this case, make sure that you have enough of your thoughts and critical
consideration of the events to include in the later assessment. If you do any reading which
informs these thoughts, do not forget to include the relevant referencing information so you
do not waste time later trying to find it.

Presentations

If you have taken part in a practical exercise or a work placement, either as part of a group
or as an individual, you may be asked to give a presentation on what you have learnt in
practice.

As a presentation is much more conversational, and sometimes interactive, than an essay or

a learning log, it might be tempting to make this more about illustrating what you have done
to your audience, rather than reflecting upon it. This is especially true if you have been on a
long work placement, in a lot of things will have happened! Nevertheless, your audience still
want to see how you have critically reflected on your performance and actions to really
learn from your experiences.

If you are using illustrative aids (such as PowerPoint slides) make sure that they are used to
underpin the points at which you are looking at your learning, and are not just there for
general description. For example, a slide on the background of your company or
photographs of an event you took part in is only really relevant if you are using them to
make a point.

Reflective Essays

Theoretically, this is probably the type of assessment that you are most used to. Much of
what is expected of you in a normal academic essay is still expected of you in a reflective
essay. You will still be expected to analyse what you are saying, reference any sources that
you have used (and you should use sources) and have a clear structure to the essay.

Thinking about what you want to include in the essay, and how you will structure it, is often
key to getting the reflection right. Think about all of the incidents or events that have most
contributed to your learning. Are there themes in the things that they taught you that you
can concentrate upon? Did they move you outside your comfort zone in some way? Are
there ways in which you can link them to your degree programme? Did they make you think
about how your prior learning worked in practice? Your essay should still select information
and key incidents to make some kind of argument, or central point. It should not just be a
recounting of events or your placement in the order that everything happened.

Strategies to help you reflect.

There are plenty of different models which you can use to help you reflect upon your
experiences. As with any way of studying or thinking about material, there is no one right
way of doing this. Some models may suit your way of thinking, others may seem particularly
appropriate for the situation you find yourself in or the assessment you have been set.
Some, such as the Skills Questionnaire, may be helpful if you are looking back over a long
placement, or even if you are trying to decide what skills you have gained over your degree.
Others, such as the Learning Cycles, may be more appropriate for filling in a Learning Log or
preparing for a specific piece of assessment. These are just some examples (there are more
examples in the literature in the ‘Further Reading’ section below). It is worth experimenting
with these to find the ones you feel are most helpful.
The Skills Questionnaire

There is a questionnaire attached to this advice covering many of the most important skills
you will need to become employable, and demonstrate to employers. If you are just starting
a placement, fill in the questionnaire and keep it safe. You can then fill in the questionnaire
again to chart your progress (possibly half way through a placement and at the end of the
placement). Have you improved in some areas? Why?

The Learning Cycle

There are several models based on the learning cycle first proposed by Kolb (1984). The one
below was proposed by Honey and Mumford (1986). They see each event from which you
learn as part of a cycle. You act, observe, reflect on these observations, change you practice
and then the cycle starts again. It may be particularly useful for thinking about your
experience in a learning log.

DO
What you did...

REFLECT
PLAN
What went well?
What specifically are you going to DO
What didn't go so well?
about it?
What do others (theory, studies) say?

FORM PRINCIPLES
If you were to offer someone else advice
about what you've just done, what would
that advice be?
So... what advice do you have for yourself?

(Williams, Woolliams and Spiro, 2012, p. 87)

This Core Model from Cottrell (2010) usefully also involves an ‘evaluation’ step in this cycle,
which may be useful in deciding what events to include in a longer piece of reflective
assessment, such as a presentation or essay. It also includes an ‘Apply’ stage, which is useful
if you need to draw up an action plan.
 EVALUATE
Is this event worth thinking about?
Why is it a valuable learning
experience?

APPLY RECONSTRUCT
Prepare for future situations. Give What happened?
active consideration to how you will
make use of your refelections. How did you feel?

ANALYSE
DISTIL
Why did it happen that way?
What an be learnt? Skills used ot
gained? Areas for training What interpretations or theories
identified? help you understand it?

Adapted from Cottrell (2012, p 207-8).

A Flow-chart Approach

If these cyclical models of reflection do not seem clear to you, or you feel you need more
guidance, then this step-by -step flowchart may help. This is based on the Describe,
Interpret, Evaluate and Plan model by Boud (1985). You may not need to fill in every box in
this.

2a. whose fault (if

8. What are my next
7. What did I learn? relevant)? How can I
steps?
learn from this?

6. How would I 1. What happened/ 2. How did I feel/do I

improve on this? what did I do? now feel?

5. What went not so 3. Unemotional view,

4. What went well?
well? including causes.
Linking Critical Thinking and Reflective Writing

The above models all try to point you towards thinking critically about your actions and
feelings, and several of them try to put these events in the context of wider theory. Sound
familiar? It is exactly what you should also be aiming to do when you write any kind of
essay.

To make this clearer, look at the table below. It is adapted from Bloom’s Taxonomy of
Thought. The column on the left shows the types of thinking that may be demonstrated in
your reflective writing. These move from the simple and straightforward (description) to the
complex types of thinking which require you to weigh up evidence (evaluation). At degree
level, we obviously want to see more of the complex types of thinking, such as analysis,
synthesis and evaluation. To help you along, the column on the right gives pointers as to
how these might relate to reflective assessments. Look carefully at your reflective writing-
which type of thought are you demonstrating?

Mode of thinking Reflective Writing

Description Description of the background of the company/placement
Events as they happened, but without in-depth investigation of how
they occurred.
Description of feelings about events, but without reflection on why
this might be the case or how this is a learning opportunity.

Analysis Consideration of how and why events occurred.

Consideration of the factors which made events a learning experience.
Consideration of the factors which impacted on events to give positive
or negative outcomes.
Identifying the most important factors in any scenario.
Synthesis Bringing together theory from degree programme and practical
scenarios to assess how this works in practice.
Bringing together experience from more than one event/source to
consider causes of events or give solutions.
Evaluation Assessing own actions and feelings to identify learning.
Assessing quality of experiences and learning.
Giving areas for improvement and assessing ways in which
practice/skills/behaviours can be improved.

Obviously, there will be a certain amount of description in your assessment, as you will need
to outline what happened in order for any investigation to make sense. However, as in any
essay, you should only include as much description as you need. Extraneous information
about the company or simply recounting or events will not gain you any marks.
Examples of Reflective Writing

Here are some examples of reflective writing which demonstrate the various different types
of thinking. Depending on the set assessment, you may do more or less of the ‘holistic’
thinking or ‘synthesis’, but you should be able to see how much more complex the writing is
in the latter two passages than the excerpt labelled ‘Descriptive’.

There are comments given to one side of the excerpts (the highlighted descriptions match
the relevant highlighted feedback) to give you an idea of the kind of feedback these kinds of
writing tend to receive and their strengths and weaknesses. You might also notice that the
excerpts which show more analysis are not afraid to say which things may not have gone so
well, and what the writer learnt from this.

Descriptive

I was able to secure a placement for one year in Is all of this detail relevant? Does your tutor
the Human Resources department of the need this background?
Liverpool John Lewis Store, which was formerly
George Henry Lees and is part of the John Lewis
Partnership. John Lewis is unusual as a major This is clearly relevant, but how exactly did it
high street retailer, as all of its employees are impact on the role in HR?
also ‘Partners’ in the business, in which they take
part in staff forums and councils, and also
receive an annual bonus depending on the Did you find this was always the case? Why? If
performance of the business. This was an idea this did/didn’t work, how did it make you think
espoused by Spedan Lewis, the son of John about what you have learnt in your degree?
Lewis, when he took over the running of the What did it make you think about working in
Peter Jones stores in the partnership in 1914. other businesses?
The idea behind this organisation is that staff are This indicates you did indeed experience
more invested in the business and have a vested behaviour from staff which backed this up. Can
interest in seeing the business succeed. This can you give an example?
make working in the Human Resources
department very different from working in other What were the different reactions? Why did they
businesses without these arrangements. come about? How did getting praise from
managers, but negative reaction from peers
While I was at John Lewis, I was asked to affect you? Did your peers have a point? Would
contribute to the staff newsletter, the Gazette, you change what you wrote if you did this again?
as a student placement employee. I wrote a
short piece on my experiences shortly before I Why do they enhance your CV? What did the
left, which gained a good reaction from my experience teach you? What skills did you gain
immediate managers, although some other staff or hone? What does it prove to future
did question some of the observations that I employers?
made about the staff experience. I think that
being involved in activities like this, which go
beyond your basic role description, are
important for enhancing your CV.
Reflecting on and Analysing Individual Events

I secured a placement for one year in the human Only as much background is included as is
resources department of the Liverpool John relevant to what is being reflected upon.
Lewis store in Liverpool. As part of the John
Lewis Partnership, all employees are considered
‘Partners’ in the business, which includes being Pros of situation noted, but these are not a
represented in forums and gaining bonuses learning experience, so are not dwelt upon.
based on the performance of the business. This
idea behind this is that staff are more invested in
the business and it success. This could make
working in Human Resources both rewarding
and difficult. It was very clear from our records
that it helped the retention of staff, as some
partners had been there for over 25 years.

However, as a new and temporary member of

staff, it could make dealing with some longer
serving partners difficult. I had to try and explain
a change in the payment system to partners, and
found that some longer serving employees were
very resistant, even though the change for them
was a minimal change to the pay day (and would
help to avoid mistakes by giving a longer lead-in
time for Payroll). It seemed that while being Analysis of the situation, why this came about
invested in the company meant that employees and why it may have been difficult in this
were invested in its success, some could also instance/in this business.
sometimes feel that their personal interests
should be given a higher priority due to their
longer-term knowledge of ‘how things work
here’. This was a phrase used by one specific Identifies the issue with the member of staff, but
member of staff as I tried to explain the rationale is careful not to make it too personal.
behind the change, which he refused to accept. I
had to pass him to my line-manager, which made Looks at thoughts and feelings associated with
me feel disheartened, as it should have been a the situation, with reasons, but does not dwell
routine discussion and I felt I had been dismissed on these
due to a perceived lack of experience. Looking
back, I should have pointed out to this member Identifies actions which could have helped and
of staff that the changes had been disseminated demonstrates an analysis of how the company
to partners through the staff forums and works and how this knowledge could be used in
generally positive comments had been received, this situation.
thus demonstrating to this partner that equally
long-serving members of staff were in favour.

I also mentioned this incident in a piece which I

had written for the staff newsletter, the Gazette,
as I had been asked to write about any
challenges I had found working there. My
managers were very sympathetic to this
situation, but some other members of staff felt
that I was being disrespectful to longer-serving
staff. If I were to write the piece again, I would
probably not include this, and it has made me
more mindful of the loyalty that staff peers can
have towards one another

Holistic Reflection and Analysis

I secured a placement for one year in the human Only as much background is included as is
resources department of the Liverpool John relevant to what is being reflected upon.
Lewis store in Liverpool. As ‘Partners’ in the
business, all employees are encouraged to
become invested in the business through staff
forums and business-performance related
bonuses.
This was not a type of business which I had come
across in my studies, and so it was a change from Links current experience in practice with prior
what I was expecting. Studies have shown that theoretical degree study.
staff who feel that they are rewarded beyond Demonstrates research into the situations and
basic pay for work do show a greater loyalty to events/ theoretical background beyond just
companies (Smith, 2007), and this was borne out personal experience. Employing skills from
by the large number of partners we had who had degree. Is careful to show this in the light of their
served over 25 years in the business. experience, and not just the actions of the
company.
While this has a positive impact on staff
turnover, making the HR job easier in some
ways, it did also mean that some longer-serving
employees could be resistant to change, feeling
that they had seen change fail before and knew
how things worked best in their situation. I had Analysis of the situation, why this came about
to try and explain a minimal change in the pay- and why it may have been difficult in this
date for employees to one member of staff who instance/in this business.
made it clear that he did not feel I had enough
experience. I was disheartened, as I had to pass Looks at thoughts and feelings associated with
this up to my manager and felt I had been the situation, with reasons, but does not dwell
treated dismissively due to a perceived lack of on these. Identifies the issue with the member of
experience. I realised that in the particular staff, but is careful not to make it too personal.
instance, I could have pointed out that other,
long serving members of staff had been positive Identifies actions which could have helped and
about the change in staff forums. However, I also demonstrates an analysis of how the company
found out that the change had not been widely works and how this knowledge could be used in
disseminated to staff not involved in the forums. this situation.
Many studies into change management highlight
the need for clear communication and direction
in the case of change from senior staff
(Pratchett, 2010; Priestley, 2011). While I had no
influence over this in this instance, it has made
me think about how HR departments
communicate with staff.
I was also asked to provide a piece to the staff
newsletter, the Gazette, about my experiences,
in which I was asked to write about any
challenges I had faced. I mentioned this incident,
which elicited a good response from my
managers, who were sympathetic, but some
other staff felt it was disrespectful to longer
serving members of staff. Again, with hindsight, I
feel I should have written about this incident
differently, including it as an example of
something valuable I had learnt, rather than a
disappointment.

Taking Your Reflection Forward

The whole of aim of reflective writing, and thereby forcing you to reflect is to give you this
skill to take forward into your employed life. Indeed, being able to reflect and give concrete
examples of your skills to potential employers is in invaluable tool in seeking employment. If
you can successfully a reflective writing assessment, you should never struggle with the
dreaded ‘Tell me about one of your weaknesses’ question! The ability for employees to be
pro-active in identifying their own training needs and seeking out ‘Lifelong Learning’ is
something that employers are coming to value increasingly (and, indeed, in some sectors it
is an expected requirement). The reflective writing you do here is only one step on a journey
which should last many years.

Further Reading

Burns, T., & Sinfield, S. (2009). Essential Study Skills: The Complete Guide to Success and
University (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Cottrell, S., (2008). The Study Skills Handbook (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.

Cottrell, S., (2010). Skills for Success: Personal Development and Employability (2nd ed.).
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.

Williams, K., Woolliams, M., & Spiro, J. (2012). Reflective Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillian.