What is reflective or reflexive writing?
Reflective writing is examining the knowledge acquired through reading or through an experience and making connections with other concepts that you have encountered in your learning.
Reflexive writing is a deeper, self-critical practice, that examines your underlying assumptions and attitudes and how they have been impacted by your learning. It is more personal than reflective writing.
This resource will step you through the what, why and how of reflection and includes practical lessons so you can test your skills.
Tools to make learning more meaningful. Practical Guide for Trainers and Facilitators.
This handbook summarises methods that can be used to facilitate the process of reflection on the knowledge and experiences people acquire during a capacity development trajectory or training event. We believe that by explicitly integrating reflection in the learning process the learning will become clearer and better articulated and will contribute more strongly to meaningful change. Therefore we advise facilitators to deliberately include reflective learning sessions in their process design and implementation. This handbook can inspire you to do so and provides many methods which help to facilitate this.
There is evidence to show that reflective techniques such as critical portfolios and reflective diaries can help students to consolidate and assess their learning of a discipline and its practices. Yet, there are also known drawbacks of critical reflection, including over selfcritical inspection and the infinite regress of reflection on action. This paper offers a theoretically informed model of critical reflection which encompasses different purposes (thinking, learning and assessment of self and social systems), together with different forms of reflection (personal, interpersonal, contextual and critical). Explicitly teaching critical reflection is a logical step towards students being able to recognise and negotiate complex ethical and professional issues. However, teaching critical reflection creates challenges for curricula design, assessment and professional development.
Smith, E. (2011). Teaching critical reflection. Teaching in Higher Education, 16(2), pp. 211 — 223.
This site is for people who want to reflect - maybe you already reflect or you have to do reflection in a course. Here you will find resources, models, and questions that can help you start your reflections as well as structuring them.
Reflection can happen anywhere and anytime and doesn’t require anything but yourself and your mind. Sometimes it can be helpful to capture it, whether that is in conversation, in writing, drawing, or something completely different.
The aim of this site is that you will have a look around and get a sense of what is useful when reflecting and then pick out the information and questions that work for you. You are your own expert.
However, if you are producing reflections for a course, make sure you know what they are asking for and follow their assessment criteria – they might have specific requirements.
In either case, reflective practice examines our thoughts, actions and experience and ask why they happened that way with the goal of improving ourselves or our understanding. This is clearly seen in the definition found on the homepage of the Reflection Toolkit.
Reflection is the act of directing your thoughts to focus your attention on a subject or an experience. While it can feel uncomfortable to formally reflect, reflection is something we do naturally. The skill with reflection is understanding how we do it and this is important as you are probably already reflecting informally every day without even realising it!
This short online lesson from Hull University will help you identify what reflective thinking is and how to evidence this in your reflective writing! I highly recommend anyone new to the idea of reflective practice to read through this and complete the activities.
