(Identifying outcomes)
Reflecting helps you to clarify what you have studied, integrate new knowledge with previous knowledge, and identify the questions you have and what you have yet to learn. .
Reflecting on mistakes can help you avoid repeating them. At the same time, reflecting on your discoveries helps identify successful principles to use again.
Many learners go through university with a passive approach to learning. Such learners engage with the learning process by accepting information that is presented to them. They often do not consider learning as a skill. Taking an active approach will help you develop your process of learning (making it easier and quicker). Such learners recognise the contestable nature of information that is presented to them. They often engage with activities, quizzes and further research to build their own understanding and viewpoint. That is a winning idea for any student.
For lots of professions, reflective practice is an important part of the job. This is valuable in many, if not all professions and is valuable for helping you continue to identify and build your professional skills development.
The table above is adapted from The Learning Centre, University of New South Wales ( 2013 )
Reflective essays
Reflective essays are academic essays; what makes an essay "good" will work for a reflective essay. What is different about a reflective essay is that the essay is about you and your thinking. However, you will need evidence from your course to back up your reflections.
You should structure a reflective essay as an essay, that is write to persuade your reader of your key reflections (or argument). The diagram above, details how to stucture your reflections through the essay. To find out more see the section on essay writing .
The following example comes from business. Thanks to Dr Colleen Hayes for the three samples.
Students were asked to write a reflective essay on their learning in the course by responding to the following question:
What key thing have you learned about corporate social responsibility in the course?
Example 1: Retelling
This writing is (1) descriptive/listing of content, not reflective and (2) not properly referenced (the definition of stakeholders is directly copied from Freeman in the lecture slides.
Example 2: Relating
One of the most important things I have learned so far is the stakeholder view of the firm. I was very interested to learn that Australia is more of a shareholder-oriented country (similar to UK/US). I come from country X, and I believe that it is also very shareholder-oriented. For example the company I used to work for did not seem to have much concern for its stakeholders. As staff, we were worked extremely hard in poor conditions without overtime pay or paid leave (employees are a stakeholder group), and the company did not care at all about its impact on the environment. The company was just so concerned with cutting costs and making more profit for shareholders - usually at the expense of other stakeholders. |
This writing involves relating to personal experience and has some integration of course concepts (stakeholders).
Example 3: Reflecting
The notion of the stakeholder challenged many of the assumptions I have about the role of corporations in society. I hope to run my own business one day, and the distinction between stakeholders and shareholders really makes me think about what responsible leadership might look like. What I appreciate about Friedman's view is its simplicity - the idea that companies pursuing their own profits creates the best outcomes for society (ref included). Adopting a stakeholder orientation (consistent with Freidman), and managing multifarious accountabilities and balancing trade-offs between them, would seem to be much more complex and a far greater challenge for leaders to navigate. However, today's internet age allows stakeholders to have global reach and a powerful voice, so I'm not sure that it would be so easy to silence or ignore them in pursuit of profit. |
More reflective (forward-looking), better citation and integration of multiple course concepts, and reflection that links with personal experience.
For this assessment, students were required to write a 1500-1800 word essay building on the themes of the course to address the question "We are all pirates". Attached under reference documents is the rubric used to mark the essay (thanks to Dr Caroline Schuster). Notice that it requires both the reflection (reflect, relate and retell) as well as the poor traditional requirements of an essay (Writing and organisation, Supporting claims with scholarly sources).
Learning journals
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“The overwhelming burden of writing my first ever reflective essay loomed over me as I sat as still as a statue, as my fingers nervously poised over the intimidating buttons on my laptop keyboard. Where would I begin? Where would I end? Nerve wracking thoughts filled my mind as I fretted over the seemingly impossible journey on which I was about to embark.”
Reflective essays may seem simple on the surface, but they can be a real stumbling block if you're not quite sure how to go about them. In simple terms, reflective essays constitute a critical examination of a life experience and, with the right guidance, they're not too challenging to put together. A reflective essay is similar to other essays in that it needs to be easily understood and well structured, but the content is more akin to something personal like a diary entry.
In this guide, we explore in detail how to write a great reflective essay , including what makes a good structure and some advice on the writing process. We’ve even thrown in an example reflective essay to inspire you too, making this the ultimate guide for anyone needing reflective essay help.
There are several types of reflective papers, each serving a unique purpose. Educational reflection papers focus on your learning experiences, such as a course or a lecture, and how they have impacted your understanding. Professional reflection papers often relate to work experiences, discussing what you have learned in a professional setting and how it has shaped your skills and perspectives. Personal reflection papers delve into personal experiences and their influence on your personal growth and development.
Each of these requires a slightly different approach, but all aim to provide insight into your thoughts and experiences, demonstrating your ability to analyse and learn from them. Understanding the specific requirements of each type can help you tailor your writing to effectively convey your reflections.
In a reflective essay, a writer primarily examines his or her life experiences, hence the term ‘reflective’. The purpose of writing a reflective essay is to provide a platform for the author to not only recount a particular life experience, but to also explore how he or she has changed or learned from those experiences. Reflective writing can be presented in various formats, but you’ll most often see it in a learning log format or diary entry. Diary entries in particular are used to convey how the author’s thoughts have developed and evolved over the course of a particular period.
The format of a reflective essay may change depending on the target audience. Reflective essays can be academic, or may feature more broadly as a part of a general piece of writing for a magazine, for instance. For class assignments, while the presentation format can vary, the purpose generally remains the same: tutors aim to inspire students to think deeply and critically about a particular learning experience or set of experiences. Here are some typical examples of reflective essay formats that you may have to write:
A type of reflective essay often used by tutors as a strategy for helping students to learn how to analyse their personal life experiences to promote emotional growth and development. The essay gives the student a better understanding of both themselves and their behaviours.
This kind of essay requires students to provide a summary of the literature, after which it is applied to the student’s own life experiences.
As you go about deciding on the content of your essay, you need to keep in mind that a reflective essay is highly personal and aimed at engaging the reader or target audience. And there’s much more to a reflective essay than just recounting a story. You need to be able to reflect (more on this later) on your experience by showing how it influenced your subsequent behaviours and how your life has been particularly changed as a result.
As a starting point, you might want to think about some important experiences in your life that have really impacted you, either positively, negatively, or both. Some typical reflection essay topics include: a real-life experience, an imagined experience, a special object or place, a person who had an influence on you, or something you have watched or read. If you are writing a reflective essay as part of an academic exercise, chances are your tutor will ask you to focus on a particular episode – such as a time when you had to make an important decision – and reflect on what the outcomes were. Note also, that the aftermath of the experience is especially important in a reflective essay; miss this out and you will simply be storytelling.
It sounds obvious, but the reflective process forms the core of writing this type of essay, so it’s important you get it right from the outset. You need to really think about how the personal experience you have chosen to focus on impacted or changed you. Use your memories and feelings of the experience to determine the implications for you on a personal level.
Once you’ve chosen the topic of your essay, it’s really important you study it thoroughly and spend a lot of time trying to think about it vividly. Write down everything you can remember about it, describing it as clearly and fully as you can. Keep your five senses in mind as you do this, and be sure to use adjectives to describe your experience. At this stage, you can simply make notes using short phrases, but you need to ensure that you’re recording your responses, perceptions, and your experience of the event(s).
Once you’ve successfully emptied the contents of your memory, you need to start reflecting. A great way to do this is to pick out some reflection questions which will help you think deeper about the impact and lasting effects of your experience. Here are some useful questions that you can consider:
These signpost questions should help kick-start your reflective process. Remember, asking yourself lots of questions is key to ensuring that you think deeply and critically about your experiences – a skill that is at the heart of writing a great reflective essay.
Consider using models of reflection (like the Gibbs or Kolb cycles) before, during, and after the learning process to ensure that you maintain a high standard of analysis. For example, before you really get stuck into the process, consider questions such as: what might happen (regarding the experience)? Are there any possible challenges to keep in mind? What knowledge is needed to be best prepared to approach the experience? Then, as you’re planning and writing, these questions may be useful: what is happening within the learning process? Is the process working out as expected? Am I dealing with the accompanying challenges successfully? Is there anything that needs to be done additionally to ensure that the learning process is successful? What am I learning from this? By adopting such a framework, you’ll be ensuring that you are keeping tabs on the reflective process that should underpin your work.
Here’s a very useful tip: although you may feel well prepared with all that time spent reflecting in your arsenal, do not, start writing your essay until you have worked out a comprehensive, well-rounded plan . Your writing will be so much more coherent, your ideas conveyed with structure and clarity, and your essay will likely achieve higher marks.
This is an especially important step when you’re tackling a reflective essay – there can be a tendency for people to get a little ‘lost’ or disorganised as they recount their life experiences in an erratic and often unsystematic manner as it is a topic so close to their hearts. But if you develop a thorough outline (this is the same as a ‘plan’) and ensure you stick to it like Christopher Columbus to a map, you should do just fine as you embark on the ultimate step of writing your essay. If you need further convincing on how important planning is, we’ve summarised the key benefits of creating a detailed essay outline below:
An outline allows you to establish the basic details that you plan to incorporate into your paper – this is great for helping you pick out any superfluous information, which can be removed entirely to make your essay succinct and to the point.
Think of the outline as a map – you plan in advance the points you wish to navigate through and discuss in your writing. Your work will more likely have a clear through line of thought, making it easier for the reader to understand. It’ll also help you avoid missing out any key information, and having to go back at the end and try to fit it in.
It’s a real time-saver! Because the outline essentially serves as the essay’s ‘skeleton’, you’ll save a tremendous amount of time when writing as you’ll be really familiar with what you want to say. As such, you’ll be able to allocate more time to editing the paper and ensuring it’s of a high standard.
Now you’re familiar with the benefits of using an outline for your reflective essay, it is essential that you know how to craft one. It can be considerably different from other typical essay outlines, mostly because of the varying subjects. But what remains the same, is that you need to start your outline by drafting the introduction, body and conclusion. More on this below.
As is the case with all essays, your reflective essay must begin within an introduction that contains both a hook and a thesis statement. The point of having a ‘hook’ is to grab the attention of your audience or reader from the very beginning. You must portray the exciting aspects of your story in the initial paragraph so that you stand the best chances of holding your reader’s interest. Refer back to the opening quote of this article – did it grab your attention and encourage you to read more? The thesis statement is a brief summary of the focus of the essay, which in this case is a particular experience that influenced you significantly. Remember to give a quick overview of your experience – don’t give too much information away or you risk your reader becoming disinterested.
Next up is planning the body of your essay. This can be the hardest part of the entire paper; it’s easy to waffle and repeat yourself both in the plan and in the actual writing. Have you ever tried recounting a story to a friend only for them to tell you to ‘cut the long story short’? They key here is to put plenty of time and effort into planning the body, and you can draw on the following tips to help you do this well:
Try adopting a chronological approach. This means working through everything you want to touch upon as it happened in time. This kind of approach will ensure that your work is systematic and coherent. Keep in mind that a reflective essay doesn’t necessarily have to be linear, but working chronologically will prevent you from providing a haphazard recollection of your experience. Lay out the important elements of your experience in a timeline – this will then help you clearly see how to piece your narrative together.
Ensure the body of your reflective essay is well focused and contains appropriate critique and reflection. The body should not only summarise your experience, it should explore the impact that the experience has had on your life, as well as the lessons that you have learned as a result. The emphasis should generally be on reflection as opposed to summation. A reflective posture will not only provide readers with insight on your experience, it’ll highlight your personality and your ability to deal with or adapt to particular situations.
In the conclusion of your reflective essay, you should focus on bringing your piece together by providing a summary of both the points made throughout, and what you have learned as a result. Try to include a few points on why and how your attitudes and behaviours have been changed. Consider also how your character and skills have been affected, for example: what conclusions can be drawn about your problem-solving skills? What can be concluded about your approach to specific situations? What might you do differently in similar situations in the future? What steps have you taken to consolidate everything that you have learned from your experience? Keep in mind that your tutor will be looking out for evidence of reflection at a very high standard.
Congratulations – you now have the tools to create a thorough and accurate plan which should put you in good stead for the ultimate phase indeed of any essay, the writing process.
As with all written assignments, sitting down to put pen to paper (or more likely fingers to keyboard) can be daunting. But if you have put in the time and effort fleshing out a thorough plan, you should be well prepared, which will make the writing process as smooth as possible. The following points should also help ease the writing process:
Although a reflective piece of writing is focused on personal experience, it’s important you draw on other sources to demonstrate your understanding of your experience from a theoretical perspective. It’ll show a level of analysis – and a standard of reliability in what you’re claiming – if you’re also able to validate your work against other perspectives that you find. Think about possible sources, like newspapers, surveys, books and even journal articles. Generally, the additional sources you decide to include in your work are highly dependent on your field of study. Analysing a wide range of sources, will show that you have read widely on your subject area, that you have nuanced insight into the available literature on the subject of your essay, and that you have considered the broader implications of the literature for your essay. The incorporation of other sources into your essay also helps to show that you are aware of the multi-dimensional nature of both the learning and problem-solving process.
If you want some inspiration for writing, take a look at our example of a short reflective essay , which can serve as a useful starting point for you when you set out to write your own.
To recap, the key to writing a reflective essay is demonstrating what lessons you have taken away from your experiences, and why and how you have been shaped by these lessons.
The reflective thinking process begins with you – you must consciously make an effort to identify and examine your own thoughts in relation to a particular experience. Don’t hesitate to explore any prior knowledge or experience of the topic, which will help you identify why you have formed certain opinions on the subject. Remember that central to reflective essay writing is the examination of your attitudes, assumptions and values, so be upfront about how you feel. Reflective writing can be quite therapeutic, helping you identify and clarify your strengths and weaknesses, particularly in terms of any knowledge gaps that you may have. It’s a pretty good way of improving your critical thinking skills, too. It enables you to adopt an introspective posture in analysing your experiences and how you learn/make sense of them.
If you are still having difficulties with starting the writing process, why not try mind-mapping which will help you to structure your thinking and ideas, enabling you to produce a coherent piece. Creating a mind map will ensure that your argument is written in a very systematic way that will be easy for your tutor to follow. Here’s a recap of the contents of this article, which also serves as a way to create a mind map:
1. Identify the topic you will be writing on.
2. Note down any ideas that are related to the topic and if you want to, try drawing a diagram to link together any topics, theories, and ideas.
3. Allow your ideas to flow freely, knowing that you will always have time to edit your reflective essay .
4. Consider how your ideas are connected to each other, then begin the writing process.
And finally, keep in mind that although there are descriptive elements in a reflective essay, we can’t emphasise enough how crucial it is that your work is critical, analytical, and adopts a reflective posture in terms of your experience and the lessons you have learned from it.
How to write a master’s essay.
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Reflective writing is a process of identifying, questioning, and critically evaluating course-based learning opportunities, integrated with your own observations, experiences, impressions, beliefs, assumptions, or biases, and which describes how this process stimulated new or creative understanding about the content of the course.
A reflective paper describes and explains in an introspective, first person narrative, your reactions and feelings about either a specific element of the class [e.g., a required reading; a film shown in class] or more generally how you experienced learning throughout the course. Reflective writing assignments can be in the form of a single paper, essays, portfolios, journals, diaries, or blogs. In some cases, your professor may include a reflective writing assignment as a way to obtain student feedback that helps improve the course, either in the moment or for when the class is taught again.
How to Write a Reflection Paper . Academic Skills, Trent University; Writing a Reflection Paper . Writing Center, Lewis University; Critical Reflection . Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo; Tsingos-Lucas et al. "Using Reflective Writing as a Predictor of Academic Success in Different Assessment Formats." American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 81 (2017): Article 8.
As the term implies, a reflective paper involves looking inward at oneself in contemplating and bringing meaning to the relationship between course content and the acquisition of new knowledge . Educational research [Bolton, 2010; Ryan, 2011; Tsingos-Lucas et al., 2017] demonstrates that assigning reflective writing tasks enhances learning because it challenges students to confront their own assumptions, biases, and belief systems around what is being taught in class and, in so doing, stimulate student’s decisions, actions, attitudes, and understanding about themselves as learners and in relation to having mastery over their learning. Reflection assignments are also an opportunity to write in a first person narrative about elements of the course, such as the required readings, separate from the exegetic and analytical prose of academic research papers.
Reflection writing often serves multiple purposes simultaneously. In no particular order, here are some of reasons why professors assign reflection papers:
Bolton, Gillie. Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development . London: Sage, 2010; Chang, Bo. "Reflection in Learning." Online Learning 23 (2019), 95-110; Cavilla, Derek. "The Effects of Student Reflection on Academic Performance and Motivation." Sage Open 7 (July-September 2017): 1–13; Culbert, Patrick. “Better Teaching? You Can Write On It “ Liberal Education (February 2022); McCabe, Gavin and Tobias Thejll-Madsen. The Reflection Toolkit . University of Edinburgh; The Purpose of Reflection . Introductory Composition at Purdue University; Practice-based and Reflective Learning . Study Advice Study Guides, University of Reading; Ryan, Mary. "Improving Reflective Writing in Higher Education: A Social Semiotic Perspective." Teaching in Higher Education 16 (2011): 99-111; Tsingos-Lucas et al. "Using Reflective Writing as a Predictor of Academic Success in Different Assessment Formats." American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 81 (2017): Article 8; What Benefits Might Reflective Writing Have for My Students? Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse; Rykkje, Linda. "The Tacit Care Knowledge in Reflective Writing: A Practical Wisdom." International Practice Development Journal 7 (September 2017): Article 5; Using Reflective Writing to Deepen Student Learning . Center for Writing, University of Minnesota.
Thinking About Reflective Thinking
Educational theorists have developed numerous models of reflective thinking that your professor may use to frame a reflective writing assignment. These models can help you systematically interpret your learning experiences, thereby ensuring that you ask the right questions and have a clear understanding of what should be covered. A model can also represent the overall structure of a reflective paper. Each model establishes a different approach to reflection and will require you to think about your writing differently. If you are unclear how to fit your writing within a particular reflective model, seek clarification from your professor. There are generally two types of reflective writing assignments, each approached in slightly different ways.
1. Reflective Thinking about Course Readings
This type of reflective writing focuses on thoughtfully thinking about the course readings that underpin how most students acquire new knowledge and understanding about the subject of a course. Reflecting on course readings is often assigned in freshmen-level, interdisciplinary courses where the required readings examine topics viewed from multiple perspectives and, as such, provide different ways of analyzing a topic, issue, event, or phenomenon. The purpose of reflective thinking about course readings in the social and behavioral sciences is to elicit your opinions, beliefs, and feelings about the research and its significance. This type of writing can provide an opportunity to break down key assumptions you may have and, in so doing, reveal potential biases in how you interpret the scholarship.
If you are assigned to reflect on course readings, consider the following methods of analysis as prompts that can help you get started :
2. Reflective Thinking about Course Experiences
This type of reflective writing asks you to critically reflect on locating yourself at the conceptual intersection of theory and practice. The purpose of experiential reflection is to evaluate theories or disciplinary-based analytical models based on your introspective assessment of the relationship between hypothetical thinking and practical reality; it offers a way to consider how your own knowledge and skills fit within professional practice. This type of writing also provides an opportunity to evaluate your decisions and actions, as well as how you managed your subsequent successes and failures, within a specific theoretical framework. As a result, abstract concepts can crystallize and become more relevant to you when considered within your own experiences. This can help you formulate plans for self-improvement as you learn.
If you are assigned to reflect on your experiences, consider the following questions as prompts to help you get started :
NOTE: If you are assigned to write a journal or other type of on-going reflection exercise, a helpful approach is to reflect on your reflections by re-reading what you have already written. In other words, review your previous entries as a way to contextualize your feelings, opinions, or beliefs regarding your overall learning experiences. Over time, this can also help reveal hidden patterns or themes related to how you processed your learning experiences. Consider concluding your reflective journal with a summary of how you felt about your learning experiences at critical junctures throughout the course, then use these to write about how you grew as a student learner and how the act of reflecting helped you gain new understanding about the subject of the course and its content.
ANOTHER NOTE: Regardless of whether you write a reflection paper or a journal, do not focus your writing on the past. The act of reflection is intended to think introspectively about previous learning experiences. However, reflective thinking should document the ways in which you progressed in obtaining new insights and understandings about your growth as a learner that can be carried forward in subsequent coursework or in future professional practice. Your writing should reflect a furtherance of increasing personal autonomy and confidence gained from understanding more about yourself as a learner.
There are no strict academic rules for writing a reflective paper. Reflective writing may be assigned in any class taught in the social and behavioral sciences and, therefore, requirements for the assignment can vary depending on disciplinary-based models of inquiry and learning. The organization of content can also depend on what your professor wants you to write about or based on the type of reflective model used to frame the writing assignment. Despite these possible variations, below is a basic approach to organizing and writing a good reflective paper, followed by a list of problems to avoid.
Pre-flection
In most cases, it's helpful to begin by thinking about your learning experiences and outline what you want to focus on before you begin to write the paper. This can help you organize your thoughts around what was most important to you and what experiences [good or bad] had the most impact on your learning. As described by the University of Waterloo Writing and Communication Centre, preparing to write a reflective paper involves a process of self-analysis that can help organize your thoughts around significant moments of in-class knowledge discovery.
Basic Structure and Writing Style
Reflective Background and Context
The first part of your reflection paper should briefly provide background and context in relation to the content or experiences that stood out to you. Highlight the settings, summarize the key readings, or narrate the experiences in relation to the course objectives. Provide background that sets the stage for your reflection. You do not need to go into great detail, but you should provide enough information for the reader to understand what sources of learning you are writing about [e.g., course readings, field experience, guest lecture, class discussions] and why they were important. This section should end with an explanatory thesis statement that expresses the central ideas of your paper and what you want the readers to know, believe, or understand after they finish reading your paper.
Reflective Interpretation
Drawing from your reflective analysis, this is where you can be personal, critical, and creative in expressing how you felt about the course content and learning experiences and how they influenced or altered your feelings, beliefs, assumptions, or biases about the subject of the course. This section is also where you explore the meaning of these experiences in the context of the course and how you gained an awareness of the connections between these moments and your own prior knowledge.
Guided by your thesis statement, a helpful approach is to interpret your learning throughout the course with a series of specific examples drawn from the course content and your learning experiences. These examples should be arranged in sequential order that illustrate your growth as a learner. Reflecting on each example can be done by: 1) introducing a theme or moment that was meaningful to you, 2) describing your previous position about the learning moment and what you thought about it, 3) explaining how your perspective was challenged and/or changed and why, and 4) introspectively stating your current or new feelings, opinions, or beliefs about that experience in class.
It is important to include specific examples drawn from the course and placed within the context of your assumptions, thoughts, opinions, and feelings. A reflective narrative without specific examples does not provide an effective way for the reader to understand the relationship between the course content and how you grew as a learner.
Reflective Conclusions
The conclusion of your reflective paper should provide a summary of your thoughts, feelings, or opinions regarding what you learned about yourself as a result of taking the course. Here are several ways you can frame your conclusions based on the examples you interpreted and reflected on what they meant to you. Each example would need to be tied to the basic theme [thesis statement] of your reflective background section.
NOTE: The length of a reflective paper in the social sciences is usually less than a traditional research paper. However, don’t assume that writing a reflective paper is easier than writing a research paper. A well-conceived critical reflection paper often requires as much time and effort as a research paper because you must purposeful engage in thinking about your learning in ways that you may not be comfortable with or used to. This is particular true while preparing to write because reflective papers are not as structured as a traditional research paper and, therefore, you have to think deliberately about how you want to organize the paper and what elements of the course you want to reflect upon.
ANOTHER NOTE: Do not limit yourself to using only text in reflecting on your learning. If you believe it would be helpful, consider using creative modes of thought or expression such as, illustrations, photographs, or material objects that reflects an experience related to the subject of the course that was important to you [e.g., like a ticket stub to a renowned speaker on campus]. Whatever non-textual element you include, be sure to describe the object's relevance to your personal relationship to the course content.
Problems to Avoid
A reflective paper is not a “mind dump” . Reflective papers document your personal and emotional experiences and, therefore, they do not conform to rigid structures, or schema, to organize information. However, the paper should not be a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Reflective papers are still academic pieces of writing that require organized thought, that use academic language and tone , and that apply intellectually-driven critical thinking to the course content and your learning experiences and their significance.
A reflective paper is not a research paper . If you are asked to reflect on a course reading, the reflection will obviously include some description of the research. However, the goal of reflective writing is not to present extraneous ideas to the reader or to "educate" them about the course. The goal is to share a story about your relationship with the learning objectives of the course. Therefore, unlike research papers, you are expected to write from a first person point of view which includes an introspective examination of your own opinions, feelings, and personal assumptions.
A reflection paper is not a book review . Descriptions of the course readings using your own words is not a reflective paper. Reflective writing should focus on how you understood the implications of and were challenged by the course in relation to your own lived experiences or personal assumptions, combined with explanations of how you grew as a student learner based on this internal dialogue. Remember that you are the central object of the paper, not the research materials.
A reflective paper is not an all-inclusive meditation. Do not try to cover everything. The scope of your paper should be well-defined and limited to your specific opinions, feelings, and beliefs about what you determine to be the most significant content of the course and in relation to the learning that took place. Reflections should be detailed enough to covey what you think is important, but your thoughts should be expressed concisely and coherently [as is true for any academic writing assignment].
Critical Reflection . Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo; Critical Reflection: Journals, Opinions, & Reactions . University Writing Center, Texas A&M University; Connor-Greene, Patricia A. “Making Connections: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Journal Writing in Enhancing Student Learning.” Teaching of Psychology 27 (2000): 44-46; Good vs. Bad Reflection Papers , Franklin University; Dyment, Janet E. and Timothy S. O’Connell. "The Quality of Reflection in Student Journals: A Review of Limiting and Enabling Factors." Innovative Higher Education 35 (2010): 233-244: How to Write a Reflection Paper . Academic Skills, Trent University; Amelia TaraJane House. Reflection Paper . Cordia Harrington Center for Excellence, University of Arkansas; Ramlal, Alana, and Désirée S. Augustin. “Engaging Students in Reflective Writing: An Action Research Project.” Educational Action Research 28 (2020): 518-533; Writing a Reflection Paper . Writing Center, Lewis University; McGuire, Lisa, Kathy Lay, and Jon Peters. “Pedagogy of Reflective Writing in Professional Education.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2009): 93-107; Critical Reflection . Writing and Communication Centre, University of Waterloo; How Do I Write Reflectively? Academic Skills Toolkit, University of New South Wales Sydney; Reflective Writing . Skills@Library. University of Leeds; Walling, Anne, Johanna Shapiro, and Terry Ast. “What Makes a Good Reflective Paper?” Family Medicine 45 (2013): 7-12; Williams, Kate, Mary Woolliams, and Jane Spiro. Reflective Writing . 2nd edition. London: Red Globe Press, 2020; Yeh, Hui-Chin, Shih-hsien Yang, Jo Shan Fu, and Yen-Chen Shih. “Developing College Students’ Critical Thinking through Reflective Writing.” Higher Education Research and Development (2022): 1-16.
Focus on Reflecting, Not on Describing
Minimal time and effort should be spent describing the course content you are asked to reflect upon. The purpose of a reflection assignment is to introspectively contemplate your reactions to and feeling about an element of the course. D eflecting the focus away from your own feelings by concentrating on describing the course content can happen particularly if "talking about yourself" [i.e., reflecting] makes you uncomfortable or it is intimidating. However, the intent of reflective writing is to overcome these inhibitions so as to maximize the benefits of introspectively assessing your learning experiences. Keep in mind that, if it is relevant, your feelings of discomfort could be a part of how you critically reflect on any challenges you had during the course [e.g., you realize this discomfort inhibited your willingness to ask questions during class, it fed into your propensity to procrastinate, or it made it difficult participating in groups].
Writing a Reflection Paper . Writing Center, Lewis University; Reflection Paper . Cordia Harrington Center for Excellence, University of Arkansas.
Helpful Videos about Reflective Writing
These two short videos succinctly describe how to approach a reflective writing assignment. They are produced by the Academic Skills department at the University of Melbourne and the Skills Team of the University of Hull, respectively.
Reflective writing involves describing your experiences and critically analysing what you’ve learnt from those experiences. There are two steps:
Make sure you check with teaching staff or your assignment for specific requirements in your subject or discipline.
There are many models to help you reflect on an event or new information. They all follow a common pattern of moving from describing to interpreting and planning the next steps. These models can also help you to structure your writing in a reflection.
If you haven’t been given specific instructions, use either the What? So what? Now what? or Gibbs model to structure your writing.
The What? So what? Now what? (Rolfe et al., 2001) model is often applied in the Health and Physical Sciences.
Description:
Interpretation:
Adapted from Bartlett and Derrington (2021).
The Gibbs Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1988) is a 6-step reflective model. It is often applied in Education, Nursing, Engineering and Applied Sciences.
What happened? Where, when and with whom?
What were you thinking or feeling when it happened?
What was good and bad about the experience?
This is one of the most important sections of your reflection.
What did you learn? What else could you have done?
If it were to happen again, what would you do? How will you apply what you have learnt?
The above examples have been adapted and used with student permission. For the full sample of a Gibbs reflection with annotations, see the Word and PDF files at the bottom of the page.
For a full sample of reflective writing with annotations, see the Word and PDF documents below.
Still have questions? Do you want to talk to an expert? Peer Learning Advisors or Academic Skills and Language Advisors are available.
Bartlett, C., & Derrington, K. (2021). Types of assignments. In C. Bartlett, T. Cawthray, L. Clark, S. Conway, K. Derrington, A. Devi, A. Frederiks, L. Gunton, W. Hargreaves, D. Howarth, S. Irvine, M. Jeffers, K. Lovric, R. McGregor, E. Peters, L. Pickstone, B. Retallick, Y. Rose, A. Sahay, ... R. Tweedale (Eds.), Academic success (Australian ed., pp. 332-339). University of Southern Queensland. https://usq.pressbooks.pub/academicsuccess/ Used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods . Further Education Unit. Oxford.
Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., & Jasper, M. (2001). Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide . Palgrave Macmillan.
50 best reflective essay examples (+topic samples).
If you have ever read reflective essay examples, you would know that these types of written works examine the writer’s life experiences . When you write a reflective paper example, you write about your own experiences and explore how you’ve changed, grown or developed because of those experiences. There’s no standard format for this essay as it may vary depending on the target audience.
Table of Contents
A reflective essay is a type of written work which reflects your own self. Since it’s about yourself, you already have a topic to write about. For reflective essay examples, readers expect you to evaluate a specific part of your life. To do this, you may reflect on emotions, memories, and feelings you’ve experienced at that time.
Since you’re writing reflection essay samples about yourself, make sure that they’re interesting and exciting. This is very important so that your readers don’t get bored with what you’ve written. Reflective essays are very personal thus, they’re a special type of essay. As you write one, you need to reflect, think, and explain.
In the essay, you should demonstrate and describe different feelings or emotions which you’ve felt in the past. These statements breathe life into your essay as your readers start picturing what you’ve written in their minds. Reflective essays are very honest, personal, and emotional, especially those which describe painful experiences.
As aforementioned, reflective essay examples don’t have a standard format. They seem easy enough to write but once you’ve sat down to start writing, you may suddenly find the task very challenging! Besides the format, you must think about the life experience you want to write about and remember everything about it.
A reflective paper example is a lot like a personal journal or diary. Of course, the difference is that other people will read your essay. Therefore, you must write it with good structure and coherence. In this regard, reflective essays are a lot like the other types of essays too.
When writing a reflective essay, you will have to examine your own life experiences. The purpose of writing such an essay is to provide yourself with a platform to share your most meaningful life experiences with other people. You can also use it as a way to explore how your experiences have changed you as a person.
You can present reflective writing in different formats. Most of the time though, people use a learning log or a diary entry format. You can use these formats and others. Just make sure that your essay has a good flow and that it’s easy for other readers to understand.
The format to use for your reflection essay samples would depend on your target audience. You can make an academic reflective essay or you can make it as a general and informal piece of writing. If you need to write the essay for a class assignment, follow the format given to you by your teacher.
No matter what format you choose, you may write an essay which:
Before you write your reflective essay examples, you must create an outline for them. Although you’d write about your own life, creating an outline gives structure to your essay to serve as a guide for what you want to write about.
Whether you need to write an essay for school, for a magazine or for any other reason, creating an outline is the very first step. With a good outline, you have a better idea of how your essay will flow from one paragraph to the next all the way to the conclusion.
When creating the outline of your reflective paper example, keep it organized. Develop the outline gradually and put a lot of thought into it. In doing this, you make the writing process much easier. Here is a rundown of the steps involved in the essay-writing process:
As you think about the content of your reflection essay samples, remember that the important thing is that such an essay must be highly personal but also engaging to readers. There’s so much more to reflective essays than just writing your story. You must also reflect on your experiences to engage your audiences.
For your starting point, think about the most significant experiences you had in your life. Those which had either a negative or a positive impact on you as a person. If the reflective essay is a school assignment, your professor would probably specify what you must write about. Here are some tips for you for writing your reflective paper example:
Reflective assignments can be assessed in different ways; below you will find information about summative, formative, peer, and self-assessment of assignments.
Assessment | Refers to when one or more people judge how well a completed task meets specific criteria. This can include self-assessment, peer-assessment and assessment performed by staff. In ‘for completion’ assessment, the only criteria for assessment is whether or not the task has been completed; the quality of completion is not judged. |
Assignment | Refers to any task completed outside of contact hours such as reflective projects, essays, or journals. These may or may not be assessed. |
Activity | Refers to any task completed during contact hours such as reflective discussions, group work, journal writing, or presentations. These may or may not be assessed. |
As highlighted on the ‘Should I assess?’ page, different levels of assessment will either require or benefit from explicit criteria and rubrics. They will help you in your assessment and will particularly support the reflectors when producing their reflections. Moreover if you decide to use peer or self-assessment, criteria and rubrics will be of great help as part of the guidelines students should be given for the assessment process.
Should I assess? (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)
Reflective assignments lend themselves well to most types of assessment.
In contrast to reflective activities, reflective assignments work particularly well for summative assessments that might carry high proportions of the overall course marks. This would be similar to a final essay in a course.
For example, this could be:
Peer-assessment can be used, but summative assessment might lend itself better to assessment from tutors or course organisers. While it is strictly possible, self-assessment might not suit summative work and it is recommended to use for formative work instead.
Summative assessment performed by: | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|
Summative assessments are high-stakes assessment. It is therefore important that students receive support on how to reflect and perform well. For instance, having a chance to practice in a low-stakes environment such as formative assessment can be valuable.
Reflection is an excellent way of checking-in partway through an initiative and supporting students with their further development. Any kind of formative assessment is a valuable way of practising for a summative assignment and therefore smaller or interim versions of final assessments are great for formative feedback.
As mentioned, formative assessment is low-stakes and can be a good way of engaging either peers or students themselves in the assessment process.
Formative assessment performed by: | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|
Reflective assignments can easily be implemented ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’. Including reflection ‘for completion’ will ensure that students start the process, but not necessarily engage with it fully. By creating a ‘pass/fail’ option you ensure that students will engage at least to the point of ‘good enough’ with the reflective process.
Types of reflective assignments that can work well ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’:
While ‘pass/fail’ of assessment is lower stakes than many other forms of summative assessments and ‘for completion’ is generally very low stakes, you still have the responsibility of ensuring that students have enough information on how to complete the assignment satisfactorily. For ‘pass/fail’, just like any other summative assessment, it means having both criteria and a rubric.
When assessing reflective assignments it is essential to have clear guidelines and criteria. The higher the stakes of the assessment (for example summative versus formative), the more important clear guidelines and rubrics become.
You can use both formative and summative assessment for reflective assignments. When posing a summative assessments it is important to allow students to practise or you must be extremely clear about what you want and provide detailed guidance.
Reflective assignments lend themselves better to summative assessment than activities do.
To get a sense of typical assessment criteria to include when assessing reflection, head to the assessment criteria page. For sample rubrics, see the rubrics page.
Assessment criteria (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)
Assessment rubrics (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)
COMMENTS
Reflective Essay on Assessment. Kerwin Anthony Livingstone, PhD. Email: [email protected]. The goal of education is learning, and the vehicle used to accomplish this goal is ...
Good Essays. 953 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. As I reflect on my past assessment process, I realized how much my assessments have changed over the years. In my early years, I used tests for informational recall as my assessments. I felt these were appropriate guidelines in which I needed to follow in order to substantiate a student's grade.
This reflective essay on assessment looks at assessment and what it is, what assessment should not be, how to constructively align assessment to learning outcomes, and valid assessment practices, among others. It is based on my personal experiences in the learning-teaching arena, from the secondary institution system to the tertiary institution ...
The Hull Employability Awards. A normal requirement of assessment at university is the ability to write in an academic style. Based on the application of reason and argumentation, academic essays draw on other academic sources. The style of writing is impersonal and discursive. Reflective writing style is different in several respects.
Reflective assessment, as I have argued in this paper, is a formative approach that places students at the center of assessment practice. Reflective assessment grows out of strong theoretical roots including ancient Greek thought, the philosophy of John Dewey, and cognitive constructivist learning theories.
Reflective essays | Australian National University
this essay on the assessment of pain, Raymet demonstrates her reflective writing skills near the end of her course. Raymet had by this stage written several reflective practice essays and gained good marks. This time though she was encouraged to deepen her reflections, speculating selectively on
A complete guide to writing a reflective essay
Implications: Writing essays aids permanent cognitive and behavioral learning; coding responses to open-ended essay questions for threshold concepts can be a valuable tool for both individual student and program assessment in experiential education.
The reflective essay is one of the most common reflective assignments and is very frequently used for both formative and especially summative assessments. Reflective essays are about presenting reflections to an audience in a systematic and formal way. Generally, all good academic practice for assignments applies when posing reflective essays.
Both the language and the structure are important for academic reflective writing. For the structure you want to mirror an academic essay closely. You want an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion. Academic reflection will require you to both describe the context, analyse it, and make conclusions. However, there is not one set of rules ...
Writing a Reflective Paper - Organizing Your Social Sciences ...
Reflective Essay on Assessment - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. The goal of education is learning, and the vehicle used to accomplish this goal is teaching. In the learning-teaching process, the fundamental component which determines the degree of learner outcomes' achievement is assessment.
Reflective writing - Assessments
In this case, self-reflective formative assessment is urged, and AfL will occur at different stages of the learning process. ... essays, and so on, the teaching progress will be benefited in return. Teachers agreed to take follow-up actions to justify the progress of teaching and learning and get further improvement. Teachers can also adjust ...
50 Best Reflective Essay Examples ( Topic ...
Reflective Essay on Assessment Kerwin Anthony Livingstone, PhD Email: [email protected] The goal of education is learning, and the vehicle used to accomplish this goal is teaching.
A reflection is an assessment task that helps you to think about: how you can apply what you've learned to future experiences, especially in your business career. Reflective writing tasks therefore link your study and your future career closely. The ability to reflect on your own actions and behaviours is a key skill in both the university ...
Implications: Writing essays aids permanent cognitive and behavioral learning; coding responses to open-ended essay questions for threshold concepts can be a valuable tool for both individual student and program assessment in experiential education. Keywords assessment, threshold concepts, reflective essays, cognitive development
ECTIVE ESSAY ASSESSMENT GUIDELINEWrite a reflective essay of your student‐teaching exper. ce in Placement #1 and #2. The essay must b. 2 1⁄2 ‐ 3 1⁄2 pa. . Use standardized English. The essay must contain all comp. Assessment Formats & Timelines To successfully complete this assignment, ensure that you adhere to c.
The purpose of this reflective essay is to critically reflect on the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) Assessment as part of my role as a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP). PWP's use assessments to gain an understanding of disorder-specific information to decide whether they are suitable for treatment within the Improving ...
A reflective essay on meeting benchmark statements; A reflective essay on a particular experience (for example a critical incident in an experiential learning course) A skills-development log; Peer-assessment can be used, but summative assessment might lend itself better to assessment from tutors or course organisers.
essment overviewA reflective essay is a piece of writing, where students are expected to describe and reflect on their experiences regarding a module's activities and learning outcomes, based on t. eir experiences. B&E students are expected to submit a 3,000-word limit essay, while USE students have to submit a 1,000-word limit essay at the ...