what is a reflective writing

what is a reflective writing

The Importance of Reflective Writing

1. Introduction

Reflective writing requires a clear line of thought, use of evidence or examples to illustrate your reflections, and an analytical approach. You are aiming to strike a balance between your personal perspective and the requirement to produce generalizations with reference to a broad audience. This form of writing is more than just your personal feelings. You are writing it to demonstrate your understanding.

When you are asked to reflect upon an event or your experiences, at that point, you are being asked to think about what happened and explain it in your own way. This type of writing is quite different from other types of academic writing. Reflective writing is a way of processing your practice-based experience to produce learning. It has two key features: 1) It integrates theory and practice. In other forms of writing, you use argument or analysis to produce evidence-based discussion. This type of writing is to explain what has been learned from a particular experience and focuses on the real or hypothetical example of how to act. 2) It has a clear purpose.

Reflective writing is a personal way of writing that increases your critical thinking to improve general and theoretical learning into practice. This learning process results in an awareness in the student about what they are learning. It is a way for a writer to express a personal opinion towards a specific topic. Reflective writing is an analytical practice in which the writer describes a real or imaginary scene, event, interaction, passing thought, memory, or form, adding a personal statement to the reader.

2. Benefits of Reflective Writing

Numerous individuals have explored and tested the concept of reflective practice, leading to an assortment of models and methods. Most seem to have the same basic components in that they require the individual to revisit an event in their mind, identifying the positive and negative aspects of their behavior and then considering how they could improve on the specific event in the future. Boud et al (1985) argue that through this process, an individual can see a “gap in knowledge” which can then be the motivation to seek new knowledge that would otherwise have the potential to avoid. This is a view shared by Mezirow (1981) and many others, who see the primary benefit of reflective practice as a catalyst for the development of new concepts and learning.

First and foremost, reflective writing provides a means for the individual to express their thoughts and feelings in regards to their personal and professional development. This can be a useful tool in the learning process as an individual is able to identify errors in their problem-solving strategies and learn to avoid them in the future. Reflective practice can contribute to self-development and by being able to explore their practice in depth, it can lead to clear recognition of what they are doing and the value that it adds in their work and to themselves. This, in turn, can lead to confidence in decision making and more professional work practice. This was realized through a study in which a sample of post-qualifying health and social care professionals engaged in a reflective writing session. It was found that after the session, the individuals felt more focused and believed that they were thinking on a higher level.

3. How to Write a Reflective Piece

Writing in this way boils down to an explanation of an event, an analysis of the explanation, and conclusions drawn from the analysis. With this basic outline of the method that you should adapt when coming to write a reflective essay, the sample will likely flow quite easily, though there are still descriptive parts and simple comparisons to other methods of writing.

Reflections require an in-depth analysis of personal experiences and an evaluation of our actions and responses. This will require some changes in writing and looking at the reflective essay sample, which focuses on convincing the reader of the author’s change from action or occurrence and is quite interesting to read. Quite often, a reflective piece of writing will require a description of an event, an analysis of that event, and an exploratory discussion of future actions in order to avoid similar situations in the future. This can make the essay quite disjointed and difficult to follow. However, in a reflection, an action or occurrence is described and then explored, with consideration being given to what could have been done differently at each stage and how any changes may alter the outcome. Finally, a reflective essay sample would end with a re-conclusion of the event, which would effectively be the writer’s analysis and closing thoughts on the event.

4. Examples of Reflective Writing

This is a thought map of how someone has come to a conclusion of how they are feeling in the present day. This person has made a thought track of his thoughts and shown how his feelings are linked to his thoughts. This will help decide whether to do something about his feelings. He has linked his feelings and thoughts to a significant time or event and shown how they might be affecting his lifestyle. This is only a section of the whole thought map, but it shows some good examples of self-awareness and awareness of the thoughts and feelings of others using the Reflecting Cycle.

This statement is an example of a learning diary but is only an evaluation of their reflections throughout the week. It has no descriptions of what has actually happened over these days. The person should use the Reflecting Cycle model each day and write how this has helped them to make improvements in their actions, thoughts, or reactions. This was the method that we used to find out what we were actually doing each day and how it was effective.

The whole statement is written in quite a positive way. There are some good points made and some points where we can make improvements. The table is a key element and we need to make that clearer. Visual aids are beneficial in an essay and this is a perfect example of that. On the last point, yes, art is beneficial in expressing feelings, but we feel this is a bit of a sweeping statement saying that everyone can express their feelings through art only.

Statement 4 is too general. There are no examples of the Reflecting Cycle, which would have helped to understand this model better. Also, there is no clear link between the description of the model and its real use in practice. We did, however, give good examples of the strengths and weaknesses of the model in the last statement. This has helped to make it clear to the reader certain times where the model would be appropriate and when it wouldn’t.

5. Conclusion

Reflective writing, a new way for an old practice, is firmly placed in higher education, from the struggles of the freshman to the capstone projects of graduate students (Yancey, 1998, p. 2) and, more recently, learning in the professions. Before examining the actual practices of reflective writing, the prerequisites and the procedures, the desires and the designs, this article considers the compass of reflective writing, focusing on the processes and intentions, within formal education. Whatever reflective writing is conceived to be, it is something central to learning: a tool for learning, learning by doing and learning from it, a mode of learning, a frame of mind, a state of being, a way of knowing, and an effort to know. Reflective writing contextualizes knowledge within the larger frame of meaning and involves a conscious effort to understand multiple layers of an experience an edge to know (Fook, 2002). The multiplicity of knowledge, and the urgent sense of change in ways of knowing and in knowledge itself, have dramatized the need to be a knowing subject and a knowledgeable object. We conclude with a taxonomy of reflective writing enabling practitioners, trainers, teachers, and students of professional fields, to be more thoughtful and more scholarly. This is achieved by illustrating myriad practices reflective writing, from personal and private to cultural and institutional, from idiomatic mini-narratives to theoretical deliberations, situated within an integrative hermeneutic circle. This will serve to enhance reflexivity about reflective writing, helping to learn about it, in order to learn through and from it.