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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.

Hi All,

Unfortunately I can't the access the specific area of the website anymore. I have looked into the website and read through all the different features. What I like about it is that this University makes an effort in helping the students with reflective writing. In my Blog Post I made a comment about the fact that reflective writing is not something you just do. In my opinion it is something that needs guidance. Well, Penn State University provides this.
They also provide a resources area which, in my opinion, would benefit the students as well. It gives students a clear example of how one reach the targets the Penn State University is telleing them to achieve.

Again, unfortunately I can't access the  Reflective Writing Steps and the Description vs Reflection page anymore. So I can't judge the Penn State on their content. However, reading through all the forum posts it strikes me that certain issues (which are mentioned in the Moon en Creme paper as well) are surfacing as well: how can one write honestly or how can one write with in an upbeat style? These are all skills which, in my opinion, need to be taught or their relevance needs to be debated.
Perhaps cultural issues are at play here as well. I hadn't been taught how to write in an honest, upbeat and sincere tone (as you have probably seen!!)...is this a British way of teaching? Maybe someone can enlighten me here?

Cheers, Eugene