purpose of reflective writing

purpose of reflective writing

The Importance of Reflective Writing

1. Introduction

The author makes the distinction that a purely analytical account of an event fails to probe into how the writer was feeling or what the presumptions and beliefs were that underlined their action. Reflective writing delves more deeply into the event so the writer can learn from the experience and can look back on the account at a later date to extract a missed learning opportunity. It is a search for knowledge which is often triggered by an event trying to capture it as a moment of realization. This sense of inquiry moves away from the surface to a deeper level of understanding. Gill continues to say, “The student will often start to analyze and evaluate experiences… this works on higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and there is evidence that deep learners tend to get more grades than those that rely on surface strategies.” At the higher cognitive level, it is hoped that the writer constructs new conceptual understandings that may change their behavior in future events of a similar nature. This often causes a writer to challenge their own assumptions and knowledge, causing their perspective on a concept or issue to change.

“I found that an analytical diary was a simple description of events. It just gave me the facts and did not tell me how the student was feeling… A reflective diary is a private record of experiences throughout work placement. This can touch on a huge variety of personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It seemed to encourage the student to write openly about everything that happened… This can only further the understanding of the student.” (Gill C 2001 The diary as a learning tool in education)

This essay will provide a description of reflective writing, its role in academic learning and knowledge construction, and the forms of learning facilitated. One method of defining reflective writing is to contrast it with analytical writing as the following extract indicates.

2. Benefits of Reflective Writing

It encourages you to think more about your learning process, and to express your learning in your own thoughts, words and ways; then, going public with this, which in turn often leads to deeper understanding. This is because through reflection, we can take the learning from an experience, and understand it. Reflection also involves drawing forth cognitive and emotional information from several sources: visual, aural, written and kinesthetic. It helps to gather your thoughts, as you weigh up options on unclear issues and follow the hints of your intuition. Thus, it aids decision making and problem solving. If you have a personal tutor, she or he may want you to talk about what you are learning in your tutorial; reflection writing can facilitate this, clarify to yourself and the tutor the learning that has taken place, and make sure that both parties are prepared for discussion. Continuing with the idea of assessment, in order to do well, there is often a minimum level of understanding that is required for a particular grade. You can use guided reflection to help you to set learning goals by clarifying what success would entail in a particular assessment. An example of a learning goal might be setting out to achieve a pass grade, which in turn may involve identifying the level of understanding required for the pass grade, and comparing this to your current level of understanding. Finally, reflection is crucial in professions where ongoing learning is essential. If you are learning from workplace, or practice based experiences, assessment through reflection can provide evidence of learning. This is often a requirement in higher education or continuing professional development.

3. Techniques for Effective Reflective Writing

Reflective writing helps writers to think in depth about a particular life event and explore its meaning, come to a better understanding of it. It is also meant to be a guide for the writer to identify an occurrence to an event that may help them understand more about themselves or it may help them to be able to help that they will make a better choice when a similar situation occurs next time. For reflective writing, it is very important to follow some simple but meaningful techniques. First off is critical thinking. Reflective writing is evidence or an exploration of experience or an event to enable the writer to identify when an event has been positive or negative and to see the value from what has been learned or experienced. Basically just reflecting on an event isn’t considered reflective writing; it is the analysis of an event or experience which clearly identifies a change or an experience is considered reflective writing. Critical thinking is very important especially for a student, as it will help them to identify the significance of an event and to clearly see the benefits what was learned or experienced. This is something that is recommended by educationalists worldwide. With the development of lifelong learning, this type of thinking is something that you will see will be increasingly used in teaching and learning methodologies. Another main technique in reflective writing is the use of a diary or journal. This is a personal record of the writer’s thoughts that are often written on a daily basis. It enhances the personal reflection of the writer with the new understanding gained from the experience. Journals are often used in the education sector to assess a student’s ability to develop their reflection and critical thinking of a particular subject. This will be very good practice for students to also use a journal for any life experiences that they may later use for reflective writing. This may be something that your teacher may recommend to do, although using a journal will always be a sure way to better your self-reflection and way of learning, from something that has happened a few hours ago to something you did 2 weeks ago which you can reflect on it with a deeper understanding.

4. Examples of Reflective Writing

One student brought a tape recorder to a teacher conference so he could record the teacher’s comments focusing on feedback. After the conference, he described his feelings entering the teacher’s lounge with his colleagues. “My face was burning; I knew I was red because I felt so stupid. I was sure everyone was looking at me thinking, ‘What a dumb move to make – he’s wasting the teacher’s time, taking time away from the real students in the class.’ I felt like he and I had a different agenda for my paper, although he made some good points, I just couldn’t shake the defensiveness and unease I was feeling. Perhaps my storytelling and radio voiceovers will be something to consider at another time and place with this teacher.” Although he was not entirely self-assured, this student’s uncertainty over the purpose of his comments at this point will likely sort itself out during later perusal of his writing and tape. This next student developed a case of writer’s block. He describes his frustration with a particular assignment, “What had been an interesting and interactive class was now clouded by my strong fundamental ideas shaping a divisive tone between me and other students with my topics and my prescriptive comments on their drafts…” This confusion and unease were indicated in his writing a few days later, “Although I’m not sure whether my strong beliefs conveyed in prolonged arguments with students outside of class, and to a lesser extent my toughly edited, persuasive essay drafts, led to some discord, I’ve chosen to focus on the arguments themselves… do they represent a change in my beliefs/views, or were they attempts to convince others to pull closer to my own beliefs?” This student hoped to gain some clearer insight about his actions and the results of those actions. In later conference with the teacher, this student would uncover that his writing was indeed an attempt to analyze the changed beliefs and values he felt would be detrimental to lose, although the teacher only discovered this from the student’s verbal explanation of the essay, so some dialogue and a tape recording may have been the preferred method of feedback.

5. Conclusion

Reflective work encourages you to make links between theory and practice. For example, if you have done a teaching placement, you might reflect on how a certain lesson went. What theory was the lesson based on? How did the children behave? What have I learned from this? Did the lesson meet its intended learning objectives? What will I do differently next time? By making these links, you are essentially using a process of problem solving. This then connects to higher level thinking as reflection can involve making judgments about what has occurred, as well as understanding linking knowledge to what you have learned. This is evaluative reflection and helps us to look at our intentions, actions, and the outcomes of events in order to learn from them.

An important element of reflective writing is the ability to express what we feel and think about an event or situation. Reflective writing helps us make a connection between educational learning and real-life situations. It helps us apply theories and ideas to practice. Reflective writing assists us to see an event in its various levels of meaning. This in turn helps us to avoid responding in a superficial way to events in our lives. If we are able to see a situation from different points of view, this can help us to avoid ‘reactivity’.