Reflective writing

Reflective writing involves describing your experiences and critically analysing what you’ve learnt from those experiences. There are two steps:

• First, thinking about and analysing your feelings and actions around an experience.
• Second, writing your critical reflections to gain insight and knowledge to help you in the future.

Important points on language

• Pronouns: In writing reflectively, you can use personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘we’.  
• Tense: You should describe events that have already happened in the past tense, but use the present tense for your current evaluation, analysis and conclusion. Use the future tense for any plan of action. 
• Expression: Write using the conventions of academic language

Make sure you check with teaching staff or your assignment for specific requirements in your subject or discipline.

• Reflecting on events: this may include experiences, tasks or observations during placements, internships or other work. 
• Reflecting on new information: this may include new theory or concepts learnt during lectures, assessments, discussions or reading. 

There are many models to help you reflect on an event or new information. They all follow a common pattern of moving from describing to interpreting and planning the next steps. These models can also help you to structure your writing in a reflection.  

If you haven’t been given specific instructions, use either the What? So what? Now what? or Gibbs model to structure your writing.

The What? So what? Now what? (Rolfe et al., 2001) model is often applied in the Health and Physical Sciences.

What?

Description:

• What was the experience or new information?
• What is your understanding of it? Why did it happen? Who was involved?
• What was your role and what actions did you (and others) take?

So what?

Interpretation:

• Why does this matter? What was the impact on you and why?
• How do you feel about it? How does it connect to you and your learning?
• Can theory or evidence from literature support your thinking?

Now what?  

Outcome:

• What did you learn from it? What will you do because of this experience?
• How will you apply what you have learnt in the future?
• Is there anything more to be understood? What are your next steps?

Adapted from Bartlett and Derrington (2021).

The Gibbs Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1988) is a 6-step reflective model. It is often applied in Education, Nursing, Engineering and Applied Sciences. 

1. Description

What happened? Where, when and with whom?

 

2. Feelings

What were you thinking or feeling when it happened?

 

3. Evaluation

What was good and bad about the experience?

 

4. Analysis

This is one of the most important sections of your reflection.

• What can you make of the experience?
• Why was this experience important to you?
• Does your analysis incorporate theory or evidence from literature?

 

5. Conclusion

What did you learn? What else could you have done?

 

6. Action Plan

If it were to happen again, what would you do? How will you apply what you have learnt?

 

The above examples have been adapted and used with student permission. For the full sample of a Gibbs reflection with annotations, see the Word and PDF files at the bottom of the page.

Learn more about Gibbs' reflective writing model in this short video.

Do:

• write your reflections as soon as possible after the event
• discuss with friends or family to get more insight and/or other perspectives
• focus on both positives and negatives.

Do not:

• include your own or another person’s personal information
• include location or any other identifiable information
• judge or criticize others or yourself too harshly.

For a full sample of reflective writing with annotations, see the Word and PDF documents below.

Still have questions? Do you want to talk to an expert? Peer Learning Advisors or Academic Skills and Language Advisors are available.