reflective writing phrases

reflective writing phrases

Reflective Writing Techniques

1. Introduction to Reflective Writing

Reflective practice is a focus for many professional bodies throughout the world. Two key reasons for this are: there is strong evidence to suggest that the use of reflective practice can help professional development (see, for example, Goulder, 1998; Wallace and Gravell, 2004) and it is often a crucial element in the award of promotions within the professions. For example, promotion from basic grade to senior house officer in medicine is linked to the development of a portfolio, which in many cases is a collection of reflective writing (Irwin, 2006). Often, students are reminded of the importance of reflective practice when they are about to come to the end of their course and need to prepare for job hunting. Other trainee professionals are likely to be encouraged to use reflective writing by colleagues who have told them of the benefits derived from it.

2. Benefits of Reflective Writing

The use of formal and more objective forms of writing here is crucial and is a process that often separates PhD level reflective assignments from other forms of reflective writing. PhD assignments are evaluated according to whether PhD level skills are demonstrated and one such skill is the ability to identify an issue at a deeper level. Hair et al. (2011) discuss the concept of objectivity: the researcher’s ability to stand back and examine data dispassionately. Writing as if you are an outside observer of your own thoughts is a great skill to develop and this is most efficiently achieved using the written word.

From tutors’ comments on previous students’ work, ‘good’ reflective assignments can be distinguished by the depth of the reflection, which is typically characterized by the thoroughness with which the student has considered an issue. Writing helps to capture the details of what you have learned and it is thought that writing actually helps you to go over the information at a later date (sometimes referred to as ‘time on task’, i.e. the time spent going over what you have learned). This ensures that an idea is not just skated over once in the mind, but it is firmly embedded, and this is exactly what a tutor is looking for in an assignment.

There are many potential benefits to be gained by writing reflective assignments in terms of both personal and academic development. In assignments that require reflective writing, tutors normally expect to see evidence that you have analysed a situation, made judgments about what you have seen, and made some evaluations of your own performance. These general cognitive processes are ones that we use in everyday thinking and they are useful in breaking down the sometimes daunting task of reflecting on a given situation. Cognitive processes underpin action (that is, we use them before, during, and after an action) and therefore writing is useful in the reconstruction of thoughts and the ordering of ideas, and it is in this format that the depth of reflective learning becomes apparent.

3. Strategies for Effective Reflective Writing

Feedback; it’s not all black and white: Taking on board feedback can be hard at times, particularly if it is negative. However, it is important to consider the reasons for other people’s comments and to realize that any feedback is a positive starting point for the discovery of how and why things have happened. Step back from the situation and consider both the feedback and the events leading up to it in an objective manner. What was it that resulted in those actions? Was it a lack of understanding or information, or perhaps a rush of blood and too much emotion? Identifying the reasons behind behavior can help steer it in a direction that elicits a more positive outcome. With time and practice, it is possible to learn to accept all feedback in a positive light and reflect in a manner that helps you become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

A positive learning experience: It is likely that at some stage you did something and it worked out better than you had expected, or perhaps you have watched someone else and thought, “That looks so easy, how do they do that?” Identifying these positive scenarios and trying to understand what led up to the event, the specific actions taken, and the methods employed can provide a valuable template for future success. Understanding the reasons why something worked can lead to its being repeated, and the best way of doing this is to get the effective actions down on paper, in a concrete plan that can be followed at a later date.

Self-awareness is the key: Ensure that you are utilizing reflection to help identify specifically what you did, what happened, and then consider what you could have done differently. How could you have handled the situation better? What are the best possible outcomes? And what hindered you from making that decision? There are a number of ways to reflect. You can revisit the situation in your mind, describing it to someone, or writing about it. Set the scene in your own mind to help jog your memory, and consider recording the discussion or getting someone to ask you probing questions about the event. This should help you gain a clearer memory of what occurred. While using reflection to consider past events is important, it is vital to concentrate much of your efforts and thoughts on future improvement.

4. Examples of Reflective Writing Prompts

– Describe one memorable event that happened in the past that you can recall vividly. What were you doing, who were you with, and why did you do it? What is the significance of this event? How did it affect you? – Describe a time when you did not do well on an assignment or exam. What was your reaction? How did it make you feel? What did you learn from this experience, about yourself, about others, about the world? This could also be about a small event such as a bad grade on an assignment and what you learned from the experience. – Jot down an early experience in which you learned about the importance of taking care of someone else. Describe the incident in detail, who was involved, why were you taking care of the person? What were your feelings at the time? What are your thoughts/feelings about the incident now? Or what did you learn from the experience? – Write a page about a person who has influenced you in a significant way. This person can be someone you have never met, a celebrity for example. What did this person do and what effects did it have on your life? How will it affect your future behaviour? – Explain an issue that you have thought about and why it is important to you. How is or isn’t the issue being addressed in today’s society? This could be thinking about a problem in the world to a complex mathematics equation. What are your thoughts on the results and what are the implications of the issue’s results?

5. Conclusion and Next Steps

Future work, synthesizing test cases can be stated dependent on this work. In the primary stage information processing heuristics would focus on a smaller set of questions to the model looking closely at simple, disjoint cases. A catalog of questions will be made alongside the FCA model, quantifying the success of certain sets of questions through the dispositional lattice. The search for an optimal question set which provides the best possible result in terms of simplicity and information gained may provide a useful set of guidelines for practitioners of medicine. This would guide them to intuitively ask the best questions and make the best possible diagnoses, with the least possible impact on patient QoL. If successful, this work could be applied in automated, intelligent questioning systems. An early version of such a system exists in expert systems/decision trees but these are often static, with no aim to minimize patient QoL impact and great potential to do so, with the wrong choice of question. By creating a dynamic system which uses the question set to navigate a lattice of possible diagnoses, users could be guided to automatically choose the best question. This could be applied to futuristic AI questioning systems or tools aiding doctors’ decision making. In addition, this work may return to communication with older people on health matters, looking to summarize the best techniques in a more user-friendly manner such as a simple list of guidelines. This could involve meeting with said people to test possible questioning strategies on real health issues.