REFLECTIVE WRITING
RACHAEL CAMPBELL
W H AT I S R E F L E C T I O N ?
REFLECTION
“Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience
think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. It is this working with experience that is
important to learning.”
(Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1985). Promoting Reflection in Learning: A Model.
Reflection: Turning Reflection into Learning. London: Routledge.)
REFLECTION
Learning is individual: Learning is contextual: Learning is
Learners start from their own The context in which you learn and developmental:
Once you have made sense of new
position of knowledge and have operate affects how and what you information and integrated it into
their own experiences to draw on. understand. an existing framework, you can
make informed choices about what
to do next and how to develop your
understanding.
HOW CAN I DEVELOP
MY REFLECTIVE
INSIGHT?
• Keep a journal.
• Self and peer assessment.
• Problem-based learning.
• Personal development planning.
• Group work.
• Useful guides:
• https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/reflective/thinking
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoI67VeE3ds
BENEFITS
OF
REFLECTIV • Helps students to:
• Take responsibility for your
E own learning
PRACTICE • Identify ways in which you
can advance your practice
and professional conduct.
HOW CAN REFLECTION IMPROVE
OUR LEARNING?
Reflection: what
Taking stock:
do I need to
what do I know
know?
(individual)
(contextual)
Feedback and
Planning: how
evaluation: how
can I take my
much and how Kolb’s learning
learning
well do I now cycle (1984)
further?
understand?
(developmental)
(relational)
• In Learning by Doing, Gibbs (1988) outlines the stages for a ‘Structured Debriefing’, which are based on Kolb’s
learning cycle:
• Description: what is the stimulus for reflection (incident, event, theoretical idea). What are you going to reflect
on?
• Feelings: what were your reactions and feelings?
• Evaluation: what was good and bad about the experience? Make value judgements.
• Analysis: what sense can you make of the situation? Bring in ideas from outside the experience to help you.
What was really going on?
(Gibbs G (1988). Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit. Oxford Polytechnic: Oxford.)
(Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.))
S TA G E S O F R E F L E C T I O N
• Conclusions (general): What can be concluded, in a general sense, from these experiences and
the analyses you have undertaken?
• Conclusions (specific): What can be concluded about your own specific, unique, personal
situation or way of working?
• Personal action plans: What are you going to do differently in this type of situation next time?
What steps are you going to take on the basis of what you have learnt?
S TA G E S O F R E F L E C T I O N
Use your journal to record honest and
contemporaneous observations about your
experience.
BUT HOW DO
WE WRITE Refer to Kolb’s learning cycle and Gibb’s
structured debriefing to help structure your
REFLECTIVE reflection.
LY ?
Practice your reflective writing. This is a
skill that students struggle with, so try to take
an opportunity to practice your writing and
read the reflective work of others.
• Be reflective:
• Assessors will be focusing on your reflective insights, rather
than your description of events, so try to ensure your
account is not too descriptive.
• Be selective:
• You are unlikely to have sufficient word limit to consider a
wide range of situations. Reflect deeply on interesting or
LANGUAGE challenging aspects. What have you learnt from them?
• Be objective:
• Try to stand back from the situation and be objective, if
possible. This can be tricky, as you are writing about your
own experience, but try to be as rigorous as you would be
for other writing assignments.
SUMMARY
According to Watton, Collings & Moon (2001):
• Be aware of the purpose of your reflective writing and state if it is appropriate.
• Reflective writing requires practice and constant standing back from oneself.
• Practice reflecting writing on the same event /incident through different people’s viewpoints and disciplines
• Deepen your reflection / reflective writing with the help of others through discussing issues with individuals
and groups, getting the points of others.
• Always reflect on what you have learnt from an incident, and how you would do something differently another
time.
• Try to develop your reflective writing to include the ethical, moral, historical and socio-political contexts
where these are relevant.
(Watton, P., Collings, J. and Moon, J., (2001). Reflective Writing: Guidance Notes for Students.)
STILL
STRUGGLING?
• Have a look at the full article by Watton, Collings and Moon:
Reflective writing – contains examples of reflective writing
with a discussion of what is good/not so good!
