Writing a piece of reflection is a useful writing activity that includes the analysis of once experience on the basis of his/her own knowledge and skills to improve and learn through reflective thinking. We all are thinking reflectively in our day to day experiences as I missed the train as I was late so I decided to leave home 5 min before for the next time. This is how we think reflectively and writing these experiences and their impacts are reflective writing. So reflective thinking is a quite natural phenomenon. In academics, most of the time students are asked to write a reflective essay to show how the learning is taking place from experiences. This formalises reflective piece of writing have key parts to involve in it and these are here;
- Writing a reflection on your personal experience of an academic or non-academic activity
- Analysing experience by describing that how it you dealt with it to learn from it
- Evaluating the experience its impact with an aim to apply its learning to make the future experience better.
- Linking related theories of reflection or the experience on which you writing reflection
There are different frameworks those are applied in the reflective writing process but these are not compulsory to use as one can develop his/her own framework of reflection or reflective writing. A framework of reflective writing is a set of question that one may ask from him about the event or experience to know the outcomes or learning points of reflection.
For further clarification of developing framework of reflective writing and inclusion of key parts in it here is an example of a student who was asked to write a reflective piece about his experience of an academic group activity;
Sample Piece of Reflective Writing
Teacher developed a framework of reflective writing and in accordance with that student wrote this reflective piece of writing;
The task of case study analysis was assigned as a group activity and experience of performing this activity has provided me with an insight into the importance of teambuilding and teamwork. During the performance of the activity, I found many flaws in our team coordination and team leadership that taught me that in future whenever I would have to work in a group I will work on team building and team coordination parallel to performing the actual assigned task. Further, If I would have an option in future to choose one from the group activity or individual work, I would go for teamwork.
Reason for choosing teamwork is that it provides you come up with many ideas at once through brainstorming. The only obstacle I found in teamwork is that once idea can be imitated. But all components of team building can help to deal with this issue. Further in future, I would set a goal for the whole group and individual group that will help to identify the free-riders in the group and assess the productivity of each group member.
