This was a challenging task for me. I had no access to the Penn State University website (they removed the reflective writing part) so I decided to do some research on my own. There are many papers one can find on the internet about reflective writing. I have read a few interesting papers and by doing so I made some notes. From my notes and the comments made on the forum I tried to come up with a piece of advice for students. Enjoy...:
Reflective Writing
A guideline for how to write reflectively.
Reflection on your learning is an important aspect of your learning. This paper explains what is meant by reflective writing and provides you guidelines in how to do so.
What is Reflective Writing?
Reflective Writing is your response to thoughts and feelings, experiences, opinions, events or new information. It is a way of thinking in order to explore your learning, an opportunity to gain self-knowledge and a way to achieve a better understanding of what you are learning
An Example
This is an example of reflective writing:
“While I had planned to use mainly written text materials I became aware very quickly that a number of students did not respond to these. Thinking about this now there may have been several reasons for this. A number of students, while reasonably proficient in English, even though they had been NESB learners, may still have lacked some confidence in handling the level of language in the text. Alternatively, a number of students may have been visual to employ
more concrete activities in my teaching”. (Ponnudurai et al., 2002)
Tips for reflective writing
Please bear in mind that there are many approaches and this is just one of them:
· Think about an idea, event or episode that you have experienced
· Describe what happened
· Explain your role
· State the most important or significant aspects of the experience
· Describe any feelings, thoughts and perceptions
· Try to explain your experience by relating it to theoretical knowledge
· Describe what this experience means within the context of your course
· Explain what you have learned
Martin Hampton from the University of Portsmouth wrote a very helpful paper. You might want to take a look at it. The Vocabulary Aid part might be useful in your reflective writing. You can download it here.