Reflective writing

Reflective writing is common to many courses that involve practical placementbased activities such as teaching, social work and nursing. Reflective writing often
benefits from using an appropriate reflective cycle to structure how to write about
the situation and what was learnt.

Reflection consists of thinking critically about an experience and learning from it by:

Exploring that experience in terms of feelings and significant features

Processing the significant features and identifying learning
Finding new solutions to dilemmas
Using the process as a tool to help develop future practice.
Reflective writing therefore:

Records for future reading how you feel about an experience before, during and
after the event
Provides a way of generalising feelings about specific events to similar events and
situations
Allows you to relate your feelings and experiences to the perspectives of others
Enables you to stand back and evaluate your feelings.
How can reflective writing be structured?

Many schools will recommend you use a reflective cycle such Gibbs (1988) or Kolb
(1974). These are ways of organising your thoughts so you can critically analyse
the event and your feelings into a coherent piece of writing. They can help you
produce writing that is more analytical and that goes beyond descriptively recording
what happened.

Whichever cycle is used there are often three main elements. These main elements
often comprise of smaller stages to put your feelings and actions into context and
think about what you would learn from the experience:

What? (description)

What was the event? When? Where? Who was involved?

So what? (interpretation)

What is most important aspect of the event/idea/situation?

Why did this occur?
How can the event and your feelings be explained?
Could anything have gone differently?
How do the stages of the event relate to each other?
Is this event/feeling similar to/different from others that you or other people have
experienced?
Now what? (outcome)

What have I learned?

What are the implications for my future practice (would anything be done
differently)?
Reflective writing
Reflective writing

Further reading

Studying at university

Creative and critical thinking

Developing as a writer
Types of teaching

Placements and work-based learning

Reflective writing advice

Learning from practice - reflection

Reflective writing RLO
more from Academic Support study resources

People who can help

Talk to someone in your school or a specialist support service