How to Write Reflectively
This Resource Page will help you:
- Identify and understand how to use various tools and strategies to engage in multiple forms of reflective writing (e.g., weekly reflections, experiential reflections, critical reflections).
- Understand how reflective writing can be used within various class assignments.
Introduction
Aside from following the rubric provided by your professor/course instructor, reflective writing requires you to achieve thoughtful inquiry that demonstrates your understanding by unpacking your assumptions and knowledge to deepen your analysis of the course material or your practical experiences. In short, the key to reflective writing is to go beyond description and move into analysis.
To learn more about what reflective writing is, check our Resource Page on What is Reflective Writing.
What is Explicit and Tacit Knowledge in Reflective Writing?
To help you understand what it means to engage critically, dig deeper into your assumptions about experiences/materials that you have encountered in class, and reflect on why you may have these assumptions, it’s important to understand the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is what we understand or see on the surface.
When we do not actively engage with our explicit knowledge through critical reflection, we reach a shallow understanding of the concepts, ideas, or materials that we are engaging with.
For example, by observation, we can see that the sky is blue – but we can’t explain why the sky is blue.
Tacit knowledge can be difficult to explain because it is influenced by our experiences and level of engagement with literature. In general, understanding what tacit knowledge is comes down to the question of “why” (e.g., why do I think x; why I reacted this way; why do I disagree with this author; why do I think these readings align or do not align with my experiences). Going back to the “blue sky” example, tacit knowledge goes beyond our observation that the sky is blue and allows us to explain why the sky is blue.
While the question of “why” seems simple, it can become difficult to unpack. However, accessing tacit knowledge is key to writing reflectively as it opens the door to understanding our underlying assumptions and provides a way for us to begin engaging in deep thinking and engagement with course materials or experiences.
How Can I Access Tacit Knowledge?
When writing reflectively, the first step is accessing our tacit knowledge. One strategy that helps us do this is freewriting.
What is freewriting?
Freewriting is a pre-writing technique to uncover and identify thoughts surrounding a topic without the pressure of following academic writing conventions. It involves writing continuously, without outlining, in sentence or paragraph form within a set period of time.
Why Should I Freewrite?
By removing the pressure and expectations of academic writing conventions, we can focus those 10-15 minutes on the topic or experience we are being asked to reflect on. When engaging in reflective writing, normally, the first few minutes of writing is about explicit knowledge. However, as we are asked to engage in continuous writing, we may begin to uncover underlying connections and assumptions we weren’t aware of that we can now identify and decide if we want to further engage with through reflective writing.
How Can I freewrite?
While you can tailor freewriting to your needs, here is a general freewriting structure:
- Open a fresh document or notebook page.
- Set a timer. A common amount of time to freewrite is 10-15 minutes.
- Write continuously, as much as possible. Don’t let your pen leave the page.
- Step away for 15 to 30 minutes.
- Review your freewriting and identify any standout ideas or assumptions you want to explore further through critical reflection.
Tip: if you are an auditory thinker, it may be helpful to record yourself talking about the idea or topic you are engaging with, rather than writing about it.
How to Write Reflectively
Once you have completed freewriting and have identified any standout ideas or assumptions you would like to focus on, you can begin to use the following strategies/tools to help you deepen your reflection.
Strategy 1: Guiding Questions
The following are guiding questions for experiential and reading reflections. These questions can be used to help you further develop and unpack the ideas, connections, and/or assumptions you uncovered when freewriting.
Assessing the text(s):
- What is the main point? How was it developed?
- Identify the purpose, impact, and/or theoretical framework of the text.
- What do I know about this topic? Where does my existing knowledge come from? What observations or experiences I have had that shape my understanding of this text?
Develop your ideas:
- What do I know about this topic? Where does my existing knowledge come from? What observations or experiences that I have had shape my understanding of this text?
- How does this text help me better understand this topic or explore this field of study/discipline?
In general, when engaging in experiential reflection writing assignments, it is important to connect concepts from class to your personal or experiential learning opportunity.
- What were your learning goals before starting your practicum, placement, internship, or experiential learning opportunity?
- What is the name of the host organization? What is their mission? What are the objectives of the organization? Who do they serve? What was your role? What did you do?
- What did you learn from this experience? About yourself? About working in the field? About society? Try to link your learning from your experience to concepts that you encountered in your course.
- Did your experience fit with the goals or concepts of the course? Why or why not? What are the lessons learned that you would carry forward in the future? What was successful, and why? What would you do differently, and why?
Strategy 2: Outlining
The following section illustrate two outlining methods: DIEP Model and Gibb’s Reflective Model. These methods are great for those who are new to reflective writing. If you have more experience in reflective writing, these approaches can be helpful in prompting your thinking or ensuring that you have hit common components of reflective writing assignments.
DIEP stands for Describe/Summarize, Interpret, Evaluate, and Plan. This model can be used for a variety of reflective writing assignments you may encounter in your studies such as reading reflections; weekly journals; and self-assessments.
While each question in the DIEP model can help you determine what pieces of your writing goes where, they can also be used to help prompt your thinking.
1. Describe: What did you read? Be as brief and as objective as possible. It may help to use the following phrases:
- What I found interesting from the lecture this week is…
- A significant issue I had not realized until…
- I now understand…that…
2. Interpret: What new insights have you gained? How does this reading connect with other experiences or concepts you have learned before? It may help to use the following phrases:
- This experience is relevant to me because…
- This concept relates to another concept that I learned about in…
3. Evaluate: How useful was this reading for you? What is your opinion, did it change from before? Why do you think this might be? It may help to use the following phrases:
- Having realized the importance of… I now understand…
- This reading will change the way I view…
- Being able to see… in this way is valuable for me because…
4. Plan: How can you apply what you have learned in the future? How does this reading relate to the rest of the course or studies?
- This is beneficial to my future research because…
- I need to develop my understanding of…
[Topic sentence] The most surprising insight I have gained so far is how important recording and distributing succinct and accurate information is to the success of the project. [Description] In the first week of my internship, I was asked to record some meeting minutes and distribute them to the project team and the client. [I] I initially felt offended as the task appeared trivial to me; it was something we rarely did during team meetings at university. [Evaluate] However, after speaking with my industry supervisor, I began to understand how important it is to keep a clear record of the meaningful points raised during meetings. [Interpret] Making accurate notes of the key outcomes was harder than I expected as the rest of my team was relying on my minutes to know what they needed to do. [Description] After reviewing my minutes, my supervisor agreed that they were sufficiently clear and accurate. [Interpret] I’ve realised that poorly recorded minutes could have resulted in missed deadlines, miscommunication and costly implications for our contract. [Plan] To improve my ability to take notes I plan on reviewing the minutes made by my colleagues for other meetings and to investigate note taking techniques such as mind mapping (Trevelyan, 2014). Mind mapping uses links and annotations to record relationships between words and indicate significance. [Interpret] This will help me to continue to develop my skills in this area and develop my ability to “prepare high quality engineering documents” as part of attaining the Stage 1 competency of written communication (Engineers Australia, 2018).
Trevelyan, J. P. (2014). The making of an expert engineer: How to have a wonderful career creating a better world and spending lots of money belonging to other people. Leiden, The Netherlands: CRC Press/Balkema.
Gibb’s reflective model (1988) is best used to help outline experiential reflections. This model helps you break down your experience into manageable chunks that allow you to structure your assignment:
1. Introduction or description of experience
- What happened?
2. Feelings
- What were you thinking?
3. Evaluation
- What was good and bad about the experience?
4. Analysis
- What can you make of the situation? How does it relate to the concepts you learned in class?
5. Conclusion
- What else could you have done within your placement?
6. Action Plan
- If the situation you are reflecting on arose again, what would you do differently?
Tip: While it is tempting to describe our experiences in detail, when engaging in reflective writing, avoid being too descriptive. Remember, reflective writing invites you to practice critical reflection by going beyond explicit knowledge. Therefore, your analysis of your experience needs to be the substance of your assignment.
[Description] Currently, I am on a teaching placement and have just started planning and delivering sections of each lesson. My first session did not go as well as I hoped. My task was to assist students in understanding fractions – because it was my first time, I felt nervous, so I fumbled around. While the students were understanding, the supervising teacher took over because we were running out of time.
[Feelings] I felt miserable, and at the time, considered pausing my teacher placement. I was embarrassed by how I managed my nerves and frustrated at how the supervising teacher managed the situation.
[Evaluation & Analysis] Now, I did not feel that the situation had been managed well or resolved. In class, we read Greene (2014), who explains that nine out of ten new trainee teachers found their first session “incredibly daunting”(p.43). It appears that most trainee teachers have moments of being “tongue-tied” and “losing their way with the lesson” (Parbold, 2009, p.223). This validated my experiences. In addition, I remember reading from Cooper (2011), that it is best to acknowledge and address these situations as soon as they happen.
[Conclusion] In retrospect, I would do several things differently. I should have spoken to the class teacher immediately after the session and voiced my concerns. That way we could have found a way that we both could support my learning as well as the classroom environment.
[Action Plan] In future, I will make sure to build up more of a relationship with colleagues. I am working alongside several different teachers during my placement, and I will speak to each of them about my nerves and find a way to create an environment that is conductive for everyone in the space. I think this can look like making sure I have enough time to prep ahead of time as well as ensuring that when my portion of the lesson comes, we are in less of a time crunch.
To see more examples of reflective writing, see our Resource Page on What is Reflective Writing.
Strategy 3: Reflective Language
The following phrases can help you generate sentences to enhance the flow of your reflective writing. Choose an element from each column and complete your sentence.
For me, the (most)...
| meaningful | aspects(s) | was/were… |
| significant | elements(s) | arose from.... |
| important | issues(s) | happened when… |
| relevant | idea(s) | resulted from… |
| useful | lesson(s) | were... |
Example: For me, the most relevant ideas resulted from the students' feedback.
| Previously, |
I | thought (did not think) |
| At the time, | felt (did not feel) | |
| At first, | know (did not know) | |
| Initially, | noticed (did not notice) | |
| Subsequently, | question (did not question) | |
| realized (did not realize) |
Example: Initially, I did not realize how I could apply Critical Race Theory within my practicum experience. However, after assisting my supervising teacher with curriculum planning, I am beginning to understand the connection between theory and practice – especially in relation to selecting children’s literature.
Having | read… |
I now | feel… |
| experienced… | think… | ||
| applied… | realize… | ||
| analysed… | wonder… | ||
| learned… | question… | ||
| know… |
Example: Having read Bell Hooks (1991) “Theory as a Liberatory Practice” I now know how critical theory is related to resistance as it evolves from the continuous work of resisting social construction that is bounded by whiteness.
Our Tips
Be selective. Regardless of the kind of reflective writing assignment, it is important to be selective in your writing. This means that you do not need to discuss every detail of your experience or reading. Instead, pick a few stand-out experiences or ideas that are relevant for your learning or research needs.
Read effectively. When engaging in reflective writing, it is key that you identify the main arguments or important elements of the text to strengthen your analysis. For more info on how to find main points in your readings, check our Resource Page on How to Read Academic Articles.
- Use the appropriate tone. While you should use a formal tone in your writing, it is acceptable to write in the first person and use personal pronouns. If you are not sure about what level of formality you should use, check with your instructor.