Reflective thinking is a powerful learning tool. As we have seen throughout this course, proficient readers are reflective readers, constantly stepping back from the learning process to think about their reading. They understand that just as they need to activate prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning task and monitor their progress as they learn, they also need to make time during learning as well as at the end of learning to think about their learning process, to recognize what they have accomplished, how they have accomplished it, and set goals for future learning. This process of “thinking about thinking” is called metacognition. When we think about our thinking—articulating what we now know and how we came to know it—we close the loop in the learning process.
How do we engage in a reflection? Educator Peter Pappas modified Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning to focus on reflection:
This “taxonomy of reflection” provides a structure for metacognition. Educator Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has modified Pappas’s taxonomy into a pyramid and expanded upon his reflection questions:
By making reflection a key component of our work, students realize that learning is not always about facts and details. Rather, learning is about discovery.
One of the major goals in any writing class is to encourage students’ growth as writers. No one is expected to be a perfect writer at the end of the semester. Your instructor’s hope, however, is that after 16 weeks of reading, writing, and revising several major essays, you are more confident, capable, and aware of yourself as a writer than you were at the beginning of the semester. Reflecting on the process that you go through as you write – even if your writing is not perfect – can help you to identify the behaviors, strategies, and resources that have helped you to be successful or that could support your future success. In short, reflecting on how you write (or how you have written during a particular semester) can be quite powerful in helping you to identify areas where you have grown and areas where you still have room for more growth.
If you write in a diary or a journal, recording your thoughts and feelings about what has happened in your life, you are certainly engaging in the act of reflection. Many of us have some experience with this type of writing. In our diaries, journals, or other informal spaces for speaking – or writing– our mind, we write to ourselves, for ourselves, in a space that will largely remain private.
Some classes will ask you to reflect on your writing, and those letters will contain some of those same features:
- The subject of the reflective essay is you and your experiences
- You can generally use the first person in a reflective essay
But writing academic reflections is a bit different from journaling or keeping a diary:
Table 5. Journaling vs. a reflective essay.
|
Personal diary/journal |
Reflection essay for a course |
| Audience |
Only you will read it! (at least, that is often the intention) |
Professor, peers, or others will read your essay. A reflective essay is written with the intention of submitting it to someone else |
| Purpose |
To record your emotions, thoughts, analysis; to get a sense of release or freedom to express yourself |
To convey your thoughts, emotions, analysis about yourself to your audience, while also answering a specific assignment question or set of questions |
| Structure |
Freeform. No one will be reading or grading your diary or journal, so you get to choose organization and structure; you get to choose whether or not the entries are edited |
An essay. The reflection should adhere to the style and content your audience would recognize and expect. These would include traditional paragraph structure, a <a class=”glossaryLink ” style=”color: #2393bd;text-decoration: none !important;background-color: transparent;border-bottom: 1px dotted” href=”https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/glossary/thesis/” data-cmtooltip=”A thesis is the writer’s central point (clear, concise, and limited) that provides the foundation for the rest of the essay. Most often located at the end of the introduction, the thesis establishes the core idea that the rest of the essay will develop. It should never be expressed as a question. A thesis can be explanatory or argumentative; if a thesis is argument-based, it is sometimes referred to as a claim. “>thesis that conveys your essay’s main points, a well-developed body, strong proofreading, and whatever else the assignment requires |
| Development |
Since you are only writing for yourself, you can choose how much or how little to elaborate on your ideas |
All of the points you make in the essay should be developed and supported using examples or evidence which come from your experiences, your actions, or your work |
As with any essay, a reflective essay should come with its own assignment sheet. On that assignment sheet, you should be able to identify what the purpose of the reflective essay is and what the scope of the reflection needs to be. Some key elements of the reflective essay that the assignment sheet should answer are:
- What, exactly, the scope of the reflection is. Are you reflecting on one lesson, one assignment, or the whole semester?
- Do you have detailed guidelines, resources, or reference documents for your reflections that must be met?
- Is there a particular structure for the reflection?
- Should the reflection include any outside resources?
If you are struggling to find the answers to these questions, ask your professor!
