A university student must know the importance of reflective thinking as he has to write reflective essays throughout his academic period in university. Reflective thinking can be simply stated as the ability to reflect your knowledge and experience to use that for developing improvements and this is the key task in university studies. To write the reflective essay first you need to think reflective it will help you come up with new ideas. As for reflective writing and reflection of knowledge into practice you need to know;
- What is reflective thinking and how to think in this way?
- What is reflective writing and how it can be written (with a clear difference between academic and reflective writing).
- Next question you would have that, how to structure the reflective piece of writing (what to include and what to exclude)
- What are tools of reflective writing?
Reflective Thinking
To write reflectively, you need to think reflectively and for that you have to;
- Experience of something related to topic
- Recalling experience by thinking what was happened
- Learn from the experience to write reflectively
We all think all the time reflectively but do not realise that we do .i.e. Have you ever missed a class as you were late then you decide to come in university before 5 min of class? This is how you learnt from an experience and decided to do something better. So this is how you think reflective in returns to an action or experience. Reflective writing is aimed to make is realize that we think reflective. This is reflective thinking about the experience that teaches you to learn from the experiences that are actually going to improve your future experiences and skills.
Reflective Thinking in Reflective Writing
First of all keep it in your mind that reflective piece of writing is different from academic writings because it more personal experience instead of describing others’ views arguments on the basis of theories and literature. First you need to realize that you had an experience and you learnt from it this is how you know the importance of reflective thinking in reflective writing. Most of the time your teacher asks you to write a reflective piece in regards to experience of writing an academic task, attending class or a workshop so this is how you realize how personal experience is related to reflective thinking and writing.
Structure of Reflective Writing
Reflective thinking gives you a way to structure your reflective writing because reflective thinking is a kind of thing that most of the time is a reaction of action thinking. But reflective writing is something that you are writing with a planning and recalling the experience and learning of those experiences through reflective thinking. In structure of Reflective writing you need to add these things;
- What: what happened and what factors were involved?
- How: How the most interesting aspect of the idea can be explained?
- What would be: What is the outcomes/learning? How it would be applied to make future experience better?
