Reflective practice

After planning out a structure for a reflective piece of writing, you need to get the tone right. Keep in mind that a reflective piece of writing should not offer a review of the quality or content of what you’ve experienced. Rather than critiquing the experience itself, your writing should offer insight into how the experience affected your perceptions, your learning and how it applies to your future learning and career.

Writing tips

It is acceptable to use personal pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ in reflective writing as you need to write about your personal experiences.

However, you still should maintain standards of academic writing style in terms of:

• paragraphing
• punctuation
• accuracy and brevity
• avoiding colloquial/informal language.

Tense

Use past tenses for events that finished at a particular time in the past.

E.g. Before I participated in the X event, I thought …

Use present tenses for current events/relevant aspects of theory/things that are or remain true.

E.g. This reflection examines ...

Use future tenses for what you will do in the future

E.g. I will do X differently in the future.

You may also need to consider using present perfect to draw a link between the past and the present

E.g. The experience of working in my team has taught me that ...

To support your reflection you may need to provide references to:

• demonstrate why something was done in a certain way by referring to policy guidelines or recent research
• explain what caused certain feelings or reactions by referring to a theory or concept from the unit
• explain what went well and what went badly by referring to policy guidelines, a piece of research or a theory to highlight why certain actions had positive or negative outcomes
• discuss what could have been done differently by referring to policy, research or theory to show that doing things differently could have had a better outcome
• justify why you plan to do something by referring to a research findings to show the value of developing a specific skill or acquiring relevant knowledge.

Citing and referencing in this way is not only good practice at university and in the workplace, but also clearly demonstrates your learning from the course and unit, and providing evidence of learning is one of the best ways to succeed in your assessments.