IT: Reflective writing
What does reflective writing look like in IT?
Reflection is also an important employability skill, as it assists in thinking about what went well in a work task and how you might improve it next time.
This applies to university assessment tasks as well. At university, students are expected to develop not just knowledge about their discipline, but also the skills that will make them effective colleagues and team members, such as interpersonal skills, the ability to contribute to and lead a team, and the ability to think about how their work is progressing and how to improve it in the future.
Reflection in IT requires you to analyse your descriptions of experiences or observations. Analysis communicates what you have learned from your reflections, and how it relates to the theories and concepts you’ve been learning about in the unit and the course. However, students may find reflective writing difficult. In the faculty of IT the most common mistake students make is that they write descriptions of their experiences, rather than reflections on
- how their experiences were
- how they felt
- what they learned, and
- how they might do better next time if a similar situation arises.
Gibbs’s Reflective Cycle
Below you will see a model (Gibbs, 1988) to help you think and write reflectively in IT. Models like this are designed to help you go deeper into the experience or situation that triggers the reflection, in order to create new understanding and ultimately gain greater awareness of self and others.
At a basic level, a reflective approach involves you asking yourself the following three questions:
- What happened?
- So what? (Why is it important or interesting? Why do I need to reflect on it?)
- Now what? (What action do I take to improve the situation or make a positive situation even better?)
Possible questions to ask at each step of the cycle
Click to see what questions you could ask yourself at each step of the cycle.