Reflective writing and critical incidents
Reflection on practice is an important aspect of your ongoing professional learning. In your course, this may take the form of a critical incident report. However, the focus is less on the event or incident or experience in itself – what is important is your reaction to it, and how it has informed your thinking and your learning.
Assessment tends to focus on how successfully you have demonstrated a capacity to analyse and reflect on events in order to learn from them. Also relevant to assessment is how much you are able to relate your current theoretical learning (for example, about the doctor-patient relationship, or about what constitutes effective communication) to a real life situation.
This section explains what is meant by reflective writing and the term "critical incident", and helps you explore the reflective learning process.
You will also find a format for the critical incident report, a sample piece of student writing, criteria for assessment and suggestions to help avoid some common errors in reflective writing.
The section on characteristics of reflective writing covers language features like:
- tenses
- speculative and hypothetical writing
- the language of self-reflection vs criticism.
Reflective writing
What is reflective writing?
What is the role of reflection in the learning process?
Conditions for reflection
The action-reflection model
Characteristics of reflective writing
Common errors in reflective writing
Critical incidents
What is a critical incident?
Critical incident analysis
Format for the critical incident report
Sample critical incident report
Criteria for assessment
Reflective writing is a vehicle which you use primarily to share your thinking and learning processes with your lecturers. The event or incident or experience in itself is not important – what is important is your reaction to it, and how it has informed your thinking and your learning. Assessment tends to focus on how successfully you have demonstrated a capacity to analyse and reflect on events in order to learn from them. Also relevant to assessment is how much you are able to relate your current theoretical learning (for example, about the doctor-patient relationship, or about what constitutes effective communication) to a real life situation.
Most importantly, you need to be genuine and honest in your reflections, as illustrated in the following quote from a lecturer:

The most important thing to get across to the students is that they be genuine in their reflections, and not write what they think I want to hear. For example, empty rhetoric like 'this incident has made me want to go and work with people in developing countries', 'since this incident I have decided to be the best doctor I can possibly be' or 'in future I will treat my patients holistically' does not score points.
References
Branch (Jr), W.T., & Paranjape, A. (2002). Feedback and reflection: Teaching methods for clinical settings. Academic Medicine, 77(12), 1185-1188.
Fook, J., & Cooper, L., cited in (2003) Bachelor of Social Work Fieldwork Manual, Dept. Social Work, School of Primary Health Care, Monash University.
King, T. (2002). Development of Student Skills in Reflective Writing. In Proceedings of the 4th world conference of the international consortium for educational development in higher education, pp. 3-6.
Whipp, J. (2003). 'Scaffolding Critical Reflection in Online Discussions', Journal of Teacher Education, 54(4), 321-333.
"Reflection is indicative of deep learning, and where teaching and learning activities such as reflection are missing… only surface learning can result." Biggs 1999 in King 2002