Reflective writing is basically evidence of reflective thinking.
In an academic context, reflective thinking usually involves:
Reflective writing is more personal than other types of academic writing. We all think reflectively in everyday life, but probably not to the same level as is expected in good reflective writing at college.
Reflective writing is a way of processing your practice-based experience to produce learning. It has two key features:
Identify important aspects of your reflections and write these using the suitable theories and academic context to explain and interpret your reflections. Use your experiences to evaluate the theories - can the theories be adapted or improved to be more helpful for your situation?
You might include a plan for next time identifying what you would do differently, your new understandings and unexpected things you have learnt about yourself.
There are two sources of evidence which need to be used in reflective writing:
1. Your reflections form key evidence of your experiences. Keep notes on your reflections and the developments that have happened during the process
2. Academic evidence from published studies and theories to show how your ideas and practices have developed in the context of the relevant academic literature.
• You can write in the first person when you are reflecting. That is, you can include yourself (I, me, we) in your writing when you are communicating personal opinions, experiences or observations
• When you are referring to theory or other writers you should write in the third person. That is, refer to other writers by name and try not to use I, me or we
• The actions (verbs) when you reflect are usually those of feeling and thinking e.g. feeling, felt, experienced, remembered, discovered, learned
• Do not use slang, contractions (it's, don't I'll) or note-taking abbreviations (i.e., e.g., etc.)
• Do reference your sources. It is not free writing
• Remember to use careful structure, paragraphing and good grammar, spelling and punctuation
Gibbs' Reflective Cycle (1988) which is one of the most famous models of reflection was designed to give structure to learning from experiences. Offering a framework for examining experiences, with its cyclic nature it lends itself well to repeated experiences, allowing you to learn and plan from things that went well or indeed didn’t go well.
It involves 6 stages:
