reflective writing prompts for students

reflective writing prompts for students

Reflective Writing Prompts for Students

1. Introduction

This is a book of reflective writing prompts. It provides a simple and effective way to integrate reflection into your teaching practice. The use of reflective writing as a vehicle for learning is not new. However, in an era of league tables, Ofsted (UK School Inspection Service) inspections, and pre-packaged curriculum packs, its efficacy has been forgotten. I have found it to be a transformative teaching and learning tool. Students love it because it is personal and non-judgmental in nature. It gives them a break from the cramming that they associate with revision, and best of all, it can lead to profound understanding of the material being studied at a level that is not often seen in today’s students. A pool of reflective writing from my IB Biology students formed the inspiration for this book. Their writing often revealed unexpected fears, misconceptions, and wonderful insights. Here is a small example to illustrate this. A first-year student learning basic biochemistry had a eureka moment. She related the cell’s production of the enzyme catalase, that she had learned from a textbook, to a recent family experience. Her mother had mistakenly mixed together two different hair dye solutions containing peroxide and ammonia, producing an allergic reaction. The student likened the damaged cells to her mother to the old peroxide-contaminated cells and the new healthy cells to the new hair dye. This was an excellent example of the links that can be made between biology and real life and a true understanding of the topic. A topic that could have been represented by a simple Venn diagram was now an entrenched memory. I have found that these kinds of reflections are often spontaneously discussed in lessons and come out weeks and even months later. This type of learning was happening by accident, but now with the accustomed practice of reflection, I make a deliberate session with the class to reflect on their chosen topic, be it the Conceptual Understanding of the IB learner profile or a lesson on osmosis and cells.

2. Benefits of Reflective Writing

Developing metacognitive skills: Critical reflection is a purposeful activity that can occur either in private or in public writing and can promote self-awareness. It can improve the quality of clinical judgment and facilitate reasoning about the what and the how of what we are doing. In this sense, critical reflective writing is a metacognitive activity, as well as being relevant to the many domains of knowledge and practice in which it occurs. It’s therefore desirable for educators to promote engagement in reflective writing for students and practitioners. Essentially, students can significantly improve the way they think, act, and perform by engaging in reflection, and this is certainly a desirable outcome.

Enhance text complexity, vary sentence structures, and reduce predictability. Critically reflective writing is more challenging than descriptive or narrative writing. It contains many of the same features as descriptive writing, but takes it a step further by inviting students to consider what has happened to them, and through this process of self-reflection, make meaning of it in a general or abstract way. This may involve reconstructing the event or exploring how the event changed the student. In the simplest of terms, this means to think about an activity after it has happened. This ‘topping and tailing’ as it’s sometimes referred requires that students look at how they approached a task or experience, if they were effective in managing it, and what they could have done differently. By making the thinking processes explicit, this can lead to students modifying future approaches and can inform future actions. This is otherwise known as the process of generalizing. So what are the benefits of this more deep and meaningful form of writing?

3. Types of Reflective Writing Prompts

One of the main reasons why some students struggle with reflective writing is that it is entirely possible to go through an entire education and never be asked to reflect on your own learning. Consequently, instructors need to provide students with a prompt and the types of prompts will vary according to age and prior knowledge. Instructors coming from a traditional academic approach may want to provide a description of reflective writing and examples of reflective writing from other students, then ask the students to reflect on their own work. An example of this type of prompt might be: “Describe the differences between you now and you at the beginning of the course.” Other students who enter a Community Service Learning course will be quite familiar with the type of reflective writing that is required of them and indeed these students may not need a prompt at all, though most will still be at home with an academic rather than a personal style of reflection. Yet others will find reflective writing a major leap from what they are used to and may need to be eased into it. An example here might be to ask the students to reflect in terms of traditional academic material from the course and slowly lead them to reflect on personal learning.

4. How to Use Reflective Writing Prompts

When using reflective writing prompts, it is a good idea to keep a structured physical or electronic journal. This will help keep your thoughts organized, and you can use this for future reference to track your personal growth. Most reflective writing prompts will be very open-ended and self-directed, so it is important that you have a solid idea of what you want to achieve. Consider any goals you may have for the week in question or any past experiences you would like to understand better. When writing, be honest and try not to censor yourself. This journal is for your own personal growth, so it is important that you can be as honest as possible. A reflective writing prompt will usually result in an emotional response. This is normal, but if it is too much to handle, it may be a good idea to do a different prompt or come back to it at a later time. Take as much time as you need to write, there is no finish line so quality always trumps quantity. Finally, take a moment to analyze what was written. What do your previous experiences say about you as a person? What can this new self-understanding help you achieve in the future? If you can answer these questions honestly and insightfully, there is a good chance you are using reflective writing prompts to their full potential.

5. Conclusion

– Personal growth: Discuss experiences that taught you something about yourself or changed your mind about something with special or lasting significance. Try to show not just what happened, but how you came to understand its significance. – Significant learning: Reflect on what you have learned—or not learned—on a specific topic, in a course, during a particular unit of study, or at a significant time in your life. You might also write about something that you learned in a manner that has had a lasting personal or professional influence upon you. – Student/Faculty relationships: Describe an experience with a faculty member or a course in some learning environment that involved you and is significant to you. What did you learn from it? How did you learn it? How do you know it? What did you learn about yourself? – Service-learning: This is a recent theme in higher education and is increasingly made part of the undergraduate curriculum. It means learning through reflective understanding exercised through active experience, in the service of society. Often it is a powerful learning method. If you articulate and reflect on what you’ve learned in such activity, you get double the learning mileage from it. Service-learning experience can be written about in several ways; for example, you could blog the learning process itself, or maintain a paced reflective journal of the experience.

You’ve started to generate a responsive and critical learning community here, one in which it’s safe for you to examine your own thinking, and in which your thinking will grow. We suggest that you write, in time, several entries in each of the categories below. To get the most learning benefit from this experience, it’s best when your writing is continuous and you’ve been able to generate a fair amount of copy which you later review, selecting out the best of what you’ve written, perhaps combining or reworking in subsequent drafting. This gives you the broadest sampling of your thinking; you also produce some writing which you can use in class discussions, analyses of course materials, or essays, which is a nice writing productivity dividend.