How To Write a First Class Reflective Essay in 5 Simple Steps

hello hello and welcome back to my channel in today's video i'm in a slightly different background as you can see i have moved all we have here is the same sofa as i had before so from now on if you hear a bit of an echo then i apologize there's not much going on right now but slowly slowly i'll be decorating and making this place be more of a home but today we're going to be talking about writing a reflective essay now this came into mind because i received quite a few reflective essay documents at the page doctor particularly from students from like a nursing background or a media communications background and i found that i was saying the same thing for feedback now a reflective essay is important because it means that you are critically analyzing a past event or past experience in order to reflect upon it and improve or deduce a learning point now unlike other type of essays flexible essay is quite unique in that you do need to understand how to write reflectively to be able to actually write it because it does form the core element of a reflective essay and so today i'm going to be talking about a principle and a model that you can use to write reflectively and to write a strong reflective essay and this framework is called the 5r framework for reflection it's actually a model that was deduced and published in a few papers from a researcher called bane and his team i'll leave a few links for it down below if you want to read it in a bit more detail i'm going to be going through the five different steps for how to reflect and how to plan a reflective essay and then how to write it and how to write it effectively enough that it is a strong reflective essay so keep on watching if you want to see this and don't forget to subscribe to my channel to see more from me i post every wednesday and sunday and mostly that watch me are not subscribed to my channel so what are you waiting for i'll give you a second go for it press subscribe button so you can see more from me and keep on watching to find out how to write a reflective essay now there are a couple of different models that you can use to write a reflective essay and there isn't really a fixed model that you should use however i found that this one i'm going to be talking about today helps you really engage with your experience helps you engage with the reflection and helps you think a lot more critically some of the top marks that come from reflective essays are to do with not just writing about the particular situation itself but more about how you built from that so how are you engaging with the literature that's appropriate to your experience how are you engaging with your actual experience and your feelings and also how are you using that to be able to improve next time and what have you learned from that process and so this model really forced you to think about all of those different aspects there are other models as well and i'll leave links for them down below in case you are interested in using a slightly different method but this one is the most wholesome and covers everything that you really should be writing about in a reflective essay now the five different points of this framework are the following reporting responding relating reasoning and reconstructing now if i just read off what each of these are from the actual paper itself it is reporting is supporting the context of the experience responding is you're responding to the experience so you're kind of saying how you felt about it at the time then you're relating the experience to current literature that could be knowledge that you have skills that you have but also other papers and other sort of studies that are related to your particular situation and then reasoning so thinking more about theoretical aspects of your experience this is where you're going into more subject-specific language and then lastly it is reconstructing your practice by planning future actions for a similar experience so this is where you are giving yourself recommendations for how you do things better and you're explaining what you've taken away from this experience because the whole point of reflecting is being able to reflect and say right this happened this didn't go that well or it did go well and this is what i want to implement in the future to have a better experience so for the first one reporting now reporting is just setting the scene when you're writing an effective essay before you can just go into it and say i didn't like this and i didn't like this you first need to give context to what the situation was so what happened how did things happen what was the situation what was your place and what was your kind of role in this particular context you want to briefly not in too much depth you don't have to go into all the depth of the situation but you want to briefly reflect on kind of describe what exactly happened you're just reporting the detail in this section you're not giving any interpretation you're not discussing you're not really saying much of your feelings either it's purely just reporting this happened that happened i was here i was there it was literally just a report of the situation and the event and for this you want to use past tense because it is an event that happened in the past so you would say i did this or i was involved in and also who else was involved was it you was there someone that you were shadowing i've read quite a few from like nursing students and pas as well who have written sort of reflections of midwifery too who've written reflections on their experience during their placements and for the start you just want to set the scene who were you with where were you what was your like what was the department just set the scene so the reader's able to i guess be placed in your particular event before they then read on to find out what exactly happened and then we're moving on to the responding section now here is where you're starting to bring a bit more thoughts and feelings into the particular reflection so here is where you're giving your standpoint about what happened and so you can use words such as i thought i felt like i believe words that kind of show what your emotions were at the time and this should encompass sort of your thoughts your feelings any observations that you might have had during that time so you've set the context you said we know what the situation is then you put yourself in that place and you're personalizing the experience now and you're saying what your thoughts were what your feelings were and how it made you feel and even just raising some potential questions that you might want the reader to think about pertaining to how you were feeling at the time and not necessarily kind of interpreting it as of yet and you also want to use some language that connects feelings and thoughts so for example subsequently this happened then this happened firstly this happened so you're joining right this thing happened and then this happened so you're kind of making it into a nice little story where you're putting yourself in the place as the person that it's happening to and then the third part is responding now here you are responding to the situation and trying to relate it to any skills or experience that you might have so some questions that you might want to ask yourself is for example where have i seen this before what can i relate this to what knowledge do i have in this particular situation and also what was similar or different to what happened in this event to what may have happened to you before now for this some language that you can use is for example this reminds me of when and the reason why you're using present tense is because you're basing it off of a past event but you're reflecting right now so you're basing it in the kind of current tense so that should be present and also you want to use terms that are comparative as well so things like similarly this was similar to terms that showed that there is similarity or differences to events that may have happened to in the past so this is all up to do with being as critical as possible and reflecting as much as possible on the particular event that you are reflecting upon then fourthly and this is actually the most i'm not saying the most important but kind of the highly rated and where the higher marks come from is the reasoning part of reflection and here you are trying to make sense of what's happened so usually you might want to use some literature do look at what your requirements ask you about but for the most part sometimes you look at literature or theory to make sense of the event and why things panned out the way they did so you want to think about any theoretical literature that might help you understand the situation a bit better let's say you weren't a nurse and you saw someone dispensing or prescribing medicine in a certain way and you were unsure but you asked and you're pushed aside or something you can use your framework because you have that nursing framework that i read about you could use that as literature and saying actually i should have been taught about this or i should have been explained step by step or what i'm just giving an example if i said i'm not a nurse but you can use literature and actual skills and theory to explain situations explain why things should or shouldn't have happened the way they did also to be critical you want to think a bit more about different perspectives so how would let's say you're a student how would a qualified doctor or nurse or pa or someone how would they react to this is the way that you reacted appropriate or could things have been done differently and again try to use literature to support your what you're saying because it really shows that you're not just reflecting on a personal level but you're reflecting on an academic level as well which is really important especially for an academic piece of writing i mean even though it's reflective and it seems quite sort of personal and a bit like a diary it's still going to be marked academically and using a structure so it is important that you include some literature here that can support what you're stating and the last section is reconstructing and this is a bit of i guess future plans what i mentioned earlier about how you want to build upon your experience and figure out how you would do things better here's where you have to be really i guess honest with yourself and this is where the real reflection like the real usefulness of the reflection comes out of it there's no point of reflecting without taking away something from that experience so what you want to do here is think about how you can do things differently next time and essentially you're developing an action plan for future instances such as this and again you can use literature here so you can either say based on literature that you mentioned in the previous sections in the reasoning sections or you can mention new literature so you can say look according to this particular theory or this particular piece of evidence this is how i should have responded or this is how things should have panned out or how i should have learned or whatever and because it didn't i do want to implement this in the future and this is how i'm going to do it so you can still use literature in this section as well to support your future plan and you want to think about what the different options are so you can say things like i will or i might or i can words that show that you are going to implement a certain action so try think about how you're going to show that you have learned something so you can even just use the terms i have learned that or it is significant that or i through this experience my big takeaway has been to show that you've reflected you've understood how things could have been done differently and you're going to put together this goal and this plan to do things differently next time that is the key takeaway point so it's really important for you to consider all five of these steps in order to write a strong reflection piece and one of what i usually find missing is a bit about literature so where you're including the skills and wider sort of reasoning and then i also find missing future work your future plan a lot of the time people are really good at describing what happened that's really easy they're really good at describing how they felt again that's quite simple that's quite easy for us to do but it's really hard for us to then take away from that something that we can implement into the next instance so those are things i find missing quite often and hopefully this five-step framework that i have disseminated to you will help you writing a reflective essay in the future if you did find this useful then i would love it if you could give me a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you want to see more from me and i will see you guys in the next one bye you

Channel: Dr Amina Yonis

Views: 3,506

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Id: whKSAKSMFs8

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021