importance of reflective writing

importance of reflective writing

The Benefits of Reflective Writing

1. Introduction

The component of reflective writing has been a significant part of the undergraduate and postgraduate medical education programmes provided by the Centre for Medical Education of the University of Dundee. The positive reaction of participants to the courses and the evidence of learning accruing from the reflective practices, led to a number of longitudinal studies that were performed to find out what students had actually gained from engaging in such an activity. This pack describes a substantial piece of work conducted in the development of portfolio based learning throughout the Nottingham Medical course. The portfolios were to include a section of personal development and monitoring, with the intention of the students increasing student awareness and understanding of themselves and their learning and the effect thereof with regard to their personal and professional goals. This was commonly thought to provide evidence for the previous Preparing for Patients material and was hoping to be an ideal environment to cultivate the personal and professional development of our medical students. The following overview demonstrates what was found to be the effect of using the tool of reflective writing as a catalyst to personal and professional development of medical students.

There are a range of benefits to be gained from involvement in reflective writing, including self-discipline, improved confidence, thinking and writing skills, insights into the nature of learning and understanding, and greater awareness of the relationships between theoretical and practical knowledge. There are also issues concerning the self-disclosure often evident in reflective writing and the sensitivity of handling and grading such material. All of these will be touched upon in the course of this pack, with a particular focus on the transferable skills which can help to develop the life-long learner, and enhance employability in the future.

2. Section One: Understanding Reflective Writing

A varied vocabulary is integral in making reflective writing interesting and sophisticated. As you would in any essay, take care to use formal and academically rigorous language, which is polished and precise. However, in reflective writing your aim is to demonstrate your personal growth by analyzing the experiences, feelings and observations that have led to new learning. It is for this reason that the use of the first person is allowed. This can be an opportunity to speak more freely and honestly than in formal assessments. An insightful turning point in any reflective assignment is when the author expresses ‘what it all means’. By this we are referring to analysis. Good reflective writers will take time to think about and interpret the significance of their learning and experiences, and make judgments on how well they were or were not successful. This can be done through a range of thinking and analysis, a learner may compare newly acquired knowledge with previous knowledge or by evaluating the steps that lead to a solution, learning or action by taking a personal SWOT analysis. In conclusion, reflective writers are able to expand on their learning by demonstrating a greater understanding of the prevailing knowledge, which has been acquired through an event or task. Reflective writing and academic rigor are not mutually exclusive, however it is essential in the first draft to focus on getting your thoughts and analysis down and not be overly concerned by the language. This is a tool to develop critical thinking and can further be enhanced by peer or teacher feedback. The real skill in this genre of writing is to be able to filter and select the key aspects of an experience and to show this efficiently without becoming bogged down with unnecessary detail. Always remember that reflective writing is not purely descriptive – in order to demonstrate the quality of understanding, critical evaluation and analysis is required.

3. Section Two: Developing Self-Awareness

Reflecting on understanding how we have interpreted and were mindful of our experiences can also develop our self-awareness. Selbst (1999) defines self-awareness as having an understanding of what we are doing while we do it and what we want to achieve in a given situation. The outcome is that an individual can choose how to behave to achieve their desired results. Self-awareness is important in gaining control over our behavior. It is easier to monitor our actions and their appropriateness to given situations against a clear criterion of what we want to achieve. This often means that someone who is self-aware will be better able to change their behavior to act in a more effective manner. An individual who has reflected on their experiences in order to learn will have a greater understanding of the reasons for their actions, and the learning process will enable them to have a clearer understanding of how they can interpret situations and react in a way which is more appropriate to achieve their desired results. This clearer understanding of the learning process and the link between experiences and changes in understanding or actions is often mirrored in models of learning. For example, the Gibbs cycle cited in Johns (1995) develops a learning process through reflection on an experience in order to develop an improved understanding and ultimately change a clinical decision based on a new understanding of the situation.

Reflection involves linking ‘new’ experiences with previous knowledge to better understand the new experience. This involves accurate observation of an experience and then description, with interpretation of this description. The outcome is that the new information changes one’s conceptual framework. Significantly, the process of reflecting on experiences also gives us a specific time to be mindful of the skills we are using. Mindfulness is a term that has been adapted from Buddhist meditative practice. It is a significant way of paying attention to and describing what is happening in the present moment, without making judgments on our experiences. By being more mindful of the skills we use, it often occurs that we will master these skills more rapidly because we have taken the time to understand exactly what it is we are doing.

4. Section Three: Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills

The way that student learning is measured in these studies is based on various types of biases that students themselves judge as beneficial to their learning. Some examples are self-worth bias, or how sure a student is on judgment of knowledge, report card effect goal orientation, good grades in comparison to learning everything you can, and the testing effect, the effects of multiple testing on memory and learning. Usually these are based around an assumption that anything that improves one’s academic competence is going to be beneficial to students. Given these, and the results of the past two studies, we can say that the impacts of reflective writing should lead to promising results.

Another study done on the benefits of reflective writing on critical thinking strategies is “The effects of guided journal writing on students’ critical thinking in a distance education.” This is a quasi-experimental design that evaluates a specially designed journal writing activity on students’ critical thinking development. The activity requires students to apply the critical thinking strategy of making inferences with regard to course readings. The activity was hypothesized as effective in that it involves practicing the cognitive skills of making inferences, students received feedback from GTF, and the overall pattern of the student learning experiences would enhance the quality of the inferences till after the activity. The results failed to show evidence to suggest that the activity had enhanced the overall quality of the inferences. Can be broken down between groups One and Two. Group One will be those in the GD journal writing assignment and Group two will be the control group. OH H hoc compares the inferences of both groups between pre and post test.

In one part of the study, students were asked to tackle assigned readings in different ways: some were asked to think critically about the reading, others were asked to analyze the reading through writing. Then, students were tested on the material in both a multiple choice exam and a writing assignment that involved evaluating and interpreting information from the reading. Students in the reflection condition outperformed the other students in judging the knowledge they acquired. Those in the critical thinking classes outperformed the others in the writing assignment. These results are promising in that they support the idea that critical thinking can be improved through writing.

5. Conclusion: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Writing

There are a plethora of benefits of reflective writing as outlined by Jennifer Moon and throughout this paper. Reflective writing can aid in “making the abstract more concrete,” Moon (199) discussing this method to help define and understand abstract ideas within nursing. This is achieved by critically analyzing the situation or task and constructing meaning from the experience. By evaluating the thought process of what happened, subsequent actions, and feelings, one can construct a deeper meaning of the task at hand. This can be achieved when looking at one of the most recognized models of reflective practice, Schön’s theory on The Reflective Practitioner. Schön discusses two types of reflective practices being “reflection in action” and “reflection on action,” where learning is identified to occur when one is “upset that what we know does not fit” and continuing to learn where “moving between the layers of particular and more general. This is then all pieced together in Moon’s (40) idea that reflecting is a way to “dig deeper and question in order to understand more about what we are thinking and in turn further our knowledge.” This is valuable throughout nursing where there is always something to be learned. Reflective writing is an effective tool that assists in the transition of students to professionals. Law, et al. recognizes that as students, adults, or professionals, it is imperative to understand that continuous learning and development is an expectation and necessity throughout the career of nursing. To clarify, they outline lifelong learning as “the continuous process of building personal, professional, and technical competencies” (7). Incorporating reflective writing as a lifetime process of self-assessment and learning can aid in the development of competencies, learning from experiences, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and working on them to reach personal and common professional goals. This continuous reflection will assist nurses in keeping up with the pace of change within the healthcare system to form the basis of qualified judgment and professional care. In the abusive case, it was clear to see how reflective writing can help prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Kuiper reiterates that painful and problematic situations are the best place to turn and reflect, to solve the problem. The acronym PQRST was a good example of this, the reflective process was placed on paper, identifying the problem (Provocation), analyze present state (Question), review what was learned recently (Reading), thought about the event (Reasoning), and lastly to talk about what was planned (PQRST). By writing this down, nurses with learning disabilities and continual communication problems can produce a document showing their reflection can then be shared with other healthcare professionals to assist in identifying the sequence of events leading to an undesirable outcome and understand that a change is necessary. Moon stated that this type of reflection can lead to making a conscious decision to do something and to try another way (99). It is here where we can see that the power of reflective writing has the potential to change behavior and in the quality of care.