The goal of this document is to guide students through the practice of reflective journaling, specifically within an academic context. The guide outlines Gibbs' reflective writing model, which guides students through six stages of reflection. This model aims to deepen students' engagement with their learning experiences by encouraging a critical examination of their thoughts, feelings, and actions in various situations.
What is Academic Reflection?
Academic reflection is a skill that requires time to be fully acquired. Both the language and the structure are important for academic reflective writing.
Academic reflection will require you to both describe the context, analyse it, and make conclusions. However, there is not one set of rules for the proportion of your reflection that should be spent describing the context, and what proportion should be spent on analysing and concluding. As learning tends to happen when analysing and synthesising rather than describing, a good rule of thumb is to describe just enough such that the reader understands your context.
To inspire you in the writing of your reflections, we present Gibbs’ reflective writing model. This model leads you through six stages exploring an experience:
- Description of the experience
- Feelings and thoughts about the experience
- Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
- Analysis to make sense of the situation
- Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
- Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.
This is just one model of reflection. Test it out and see how it works for you. If you find that only a few of the questions are helpful for you, focus on those. However, by thinking about each stage you are more likely to engage critically with your learning experience.
Description
Here you have a chance to describe the situation in detail. The main points to include here concern what happened. Your feelings and conclusions will come later. It is important to remember to keep the information provided relevant and to-the-point. Do not expand on details that are not required.
Helpful questions:
- What happened?
- When and where did it happen?
- Who was present?
- What did you and the other people do?
- What was the outcome of the situation?
- Why were you there?
- What did you want to happen?
Feelings
Here you can explore any feelings or thoughts that you had during the experience and how they may have impacted the experience. You can discuss your emotions honestly but remember that this is an academic piece of writing, so avoid ‘chatty’ text and ‘dear diary’ style.
Helpful questions:
- What were you feeling during the situation?
- What were you feeling before and after the situation?
- What do you think other people were feeling about the situation?
- What do you think other people feel about the situation now?
- What were you thinking during the situation?
- What do you think about the situation now?
Evaluation
Here you have a chance to evaluate what worked and what didn’t work in the situation. Try to be as objective and honest as possible. To get the most out of your reflection focus on both the positive and the negative aspects of the situation, even if it was primarily one or the other.
Helpful questions:
- What was good and bad about the experience?
- What went well?
- What didn’t go so well?
- What did you and other people contribute to the situation (positively or negatively)?
Analysis
The analysis step is where you have a chance to make sense of what happened. Up until now you have focused on details around what happened in the situation. Now you have a chance to extract meaning from it. You want to target the different aspects that went well or poorly and ask yourself why. If you are looking to include academic literature, this is the natural place to include it. This is the place where you should link theory to practice, showing the connections, the strengths and shortcoming of your approach.
Helpful questions:
- Why did things go well?
- Why didn’t it go well?
- What sense can I make of the situation?
- What knowledge – my own or others (for example academic literature) can help me understand the situation?
Conclusions
In this section you can make conclusions about what happened. This is where you summarise your learning and highlight what changes to your actions could improve the outcome in the future. It should be a natural response to the previous sections.
Helpful questions:
- What did I learn from this situation?
- How could this have been a more positive situation for everyone involved?
- What skills do I need to develop for me to handle a situation like this better?
- What else could I have done?
Action plan
At this step you plan for what you would act in a similar or related situation in the future. You can think about what aspects of your actions you would like to keep and which ones you would like to change. It can also be extremely helpful to think about what would help you to act differently – such that you don’t only make a plan, but you also make sure it happens. Sometimes just the realisation is enough, but other times reminders might be helpful.
Helpful questions:
- If I had to do the same thing again, what would I do in the same way?
- If I had to do the same thing again, what would I do differently?
- How will I develop the required skills I need?
- How can I make sure that I can act differently next time?
You can use the model above to help your reflection.