Introduction to Reflection and Reflective Writing 392021 What

Introduction to Reflection and Reflective Writing 3/9/2021

What is Reflection? Reflection is an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull it over and evaluate it. (1985: 19) 3/9/2021

Reflection helps learners to: ■ understand what they already know (individual) ■ identify what they need to know in order to advance understanding of the subject (contextual) ■ make sense of new information and feedback in the context of their own experience (relational) ■ guide choices for further learning (developmental) 3/9/2021

‘’I’m always late for work’’ ‘’That was a great holiday’’ Personal Reflections ‘’My car has turned out to be an old banger’’ ‘’I’ve had a very productive weekend’’ ‘’I keep running out of money before the end of the month’’ 3/9/2021

Formal Reflective Practice The act of reflecting is one which causes us to make sense of what we’ve learned, why we learned it, and how that particular increment of learning took place. Moreover, reflection is about linking one increment of learning to the wider perspective of learning – heading towards seeing the bigger picture. -- Phil Race

Experience The basics: Action Reflection

(Cited in Jasper, 2003, p. 99) What? Borton’s (1970) cue questions: Now what? So what?

What? Describing event or process Future goals and actions Now what? Thinking and analysis So what? Drawing conclusions

Writing about writing? You wrote an essay What was the overall process? What specific things did you have to do? Critical incident Was it Positive or negative experience? What skills did you use? What strengths did you develop? What challenges did you encounter?

What is a critical incident? Something that happened that is, in some way, significant For you personally, Or in a wider context and that you can learn from by considering it more deeply It does not have to be earthshattering It can be either positive or negative

Skills involved Self-awareness* Description / factual reporting Critical analysis Synthesis Evaluation (Atkins and Schutz, 2008, p. 26) *Self-awareness is the main skill that is not usual in other types of academic writing.

Skills / attitudes for reflection 3/9/2021 Willing to learn from experience and change things Able to make time for reflection Being open and honest Willing to share and discuss your experiences Being motivated to replay / describe / analyse experiences Able to make an action plan

In-Class: Focused free write Assignment v. Start from the incident, experience, process you want to reflect on v. Write for 5 -15 minutes without stopping, just following your train of thought as if you are talking to yourself on paper v. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, punctuation or anything else v. If you wander off the topic, don’t worry, just bring yourself gently back v. When the time is up, skim through for any interesting/useful words, phrases, ideas or thoughts The idea of free writing, from which focused free writing is adapted, was popularised by Peter Elbow (1973)