18 Reflective Writing: Thinking about me

You might think, “Why do I need to learn about reflective writing? I’ve written reflections every year in school. I could get up at 8 am and write a reflection for my 9 am course. Easy, peasy. No sweat.” So, why do you need to learn to write a reflection now?

Well, because reflection is more than just quickly putting some words on a document about what you did during your summer break. Reflection is a deliberate, conscious way of thinking. Reflecting makes you think about what you did (cognition), and then think about why you made the choices you made (metacognition). This reflective process helps you assess and build on previous knowledge like why you wrote a research project about mental health rather than social hierarchy, or why you chose to dye your hair bright pink instead of black.

Reflection is careful thinking and consideration about your experiences. It can take the form of thinking, talking, or writing. The goal of reflection is to help you work through your thoughts and feelings about your experiences. Reflection also helps you to remove yourself from the initial experience, so you can analyze it and see how you might do things differently next time. You can also use reflection to compare, contrast, and bring together experiences from different parts of your life.

Continuous Reflection for Continuous Learning

Now that you have some ideas of what reflection/reflective writing is, you might be thinking, “It sounds hard and dull, why should I do it?” Because reflection/reflective writing can help you in whatever you do: in your academic career, your professional career, or even your personal life. “I baked that cake, and boy was it awful. What did I do wrong?” Ah ha! Reflection!

Reflective practice has a lot of benefits. Students who participate in reflection have a more in-depth understanding of their learning and can take informed actions. Reflection can help you be a better student. However, it is hard work! It can make you uncomfortable, open you up to fear of judgment and criticism. It can make you feel vulnerable. You need to be willing to explore your thoughts and your feelings. You need to be willing to honestly think about what went wrong, what went right, and what you want to do in your next attempt.

The most important thing you can do when you have trouble with reflection is to keep trying. If you feel challenged, see that as an opportunity for you to grow and develop. Adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset is about establishing that you can do difficult things, even if you can’t accomplish them yet.

Ongoing reflective practice provides huge benefits for developing and increasing awareness of self and others. It develops creativity and encourages curiosity for deeper insights to inform future actions in work processes. The more you practice reflection, the easier it will become.

REFLECTION, TRANSFER, & METACOGNITION

One part of why we engage in reflective practice is so we can think about what we have learned and how we have learned it. Remember the cake example from earlier? We do this so we can repeat successes or learn not to repeat a failure, so we can apply what we have learned to new situations. This application process is called transfer.

The key to successful transfer is the ability to integrate the knowledge you already have with new knowledge. For example, a traditional persuasive essay assignment may prompt a first-year writing student to recall what they already know about making arguments and deploy those strategies in a highly formal academic essay. The prior knowledge in this example is the student’s familiarity with debate and argumentation and writing skills.

To foster transfer, a writing instructor might then ask the student to not only attempt a persuasive essay, but then, once it’s completed and turned in, to write about the process of drafting the essay. The goal in such a reflective assignment is to ask the student to recognize the prior knowledge, the new knowledge, and what might carry over (transfer) into other contexts and future writing situations. This process is known as metacognition.

Metacognition is a buzzword associated with reflective learning and allows writers to assess which skills and knowledge sets apply in these situations and which do not…metacognition…endows writers with a certain control over their work.

These reflective writing situations require metacognition, the ability of a student to reflect on their process and their knowledge. Crudely defined, it means something like, ‘thinking about thinking.’ What’s key about metacognition is that it’s a habit of mind—something that must be practiced. This video provides an overview of the concept of metacognition and how this links into learning.

The Driscoll Method

Now you’re telling me there’s a format for reflective writing? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying there are MANY formats. Reflective writing isn’t just word salad scrawled on a scrap of paper 10 minutes before it’s due with a broken pen. That’s a diary entry. Effective reflection for transferring knowledge helps you engage in transferring what you have learned by using critical thought.

Terry Borton is acknowledged as creating the model, but John Driscoll refined this thinking in 1994. Driscoll developed the “What?” cycle of reflection for healthcare practitioners, but it has since been picked up by many kinds of learners. The model includes three very basic steps:

1. WHAT? Describe what happened.
2. SO WHAT? Analyze the event.
3. NOW WHAT? Anticipate future practice, based on what you learned.

Each step requires different rhetorical strategies and distinct forms of cognition.

• Step 1: “What?” challenges the learner to recall what happened as objectively as possible, without critiquing anything that happened. This is simply outlining the event as it occurred.
• Step 2: “So what?” requires the learner to slow down and begin looking for patterns or moments of significance. Not just what happened, but why what happened mattered. For example, a student might learn different rhetorical terms that relate to persuasion, such as logos, pathos, and ethos. Analyzing the experience according to any one of those terms is a form of analysis.
• Step 3: “Now what?” encourages the learner to begin transferring new knowledge to future situations and other contexts. Transfer is key to becoming a reflective practitioner.

Ok, now how does Driscoll’s Method come together? I can do this in three sentences, right? Well, think about it. You are writing something that you can use to see what you did right and where improvements can be made. Wouldn’t you think that more than three sentences are required to act as a reminder to you?

Now we have examined what reflection is and its importance in your academic, professional, and personal life. No matter what profession you go into, you will probably engage in many daily reflections. In your personal life, you may just be thinking about why that cake tasted so bad.

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Resources: Reflection Worksheet

Licenses and Attributions

WIL Reflection Worksheet by Deb Nielsen; Emily Ballantyne; Faatimah Murad; and Melissa Fournier is licensed under a CC BY- NC 4.0 licence, based on Driscoll, 2017, p. 65.