In the article, best assignment writers will define personal reflection, state its importance, describe the formal structure to tell about its components, and end it with a few simple but important final thoughts. Let’s start from the definition.
What Is A Personal Reflection?
In general, a reflection paper is the one that needs a writer to give opinions on a topic. In detail, the opinion must be supported by personal experiences. Adding examples from the personal events will further help to get closer to the main aims. In different authors’ perspectives, we can see the reflection from many dimensions like:- In educational reflections, the writers give personal reflections on books, phenomena, and lectures.
- In professional reflection, the teachers and social workers gather information about a person’s behaviour.
- Personal reflection (point of this discussion) is an act of describing things from the writer’s view.
Importance Of Personal Reflection:
Other than reflection, listing personal experiences or using them as an evidence is considered as a discouraging factor in academics. The best thing about the reflective paper is that your answer can never get wrong. In such tasks, the writer has full liberty to express what is running inside their mind- either wrong or right. Their duty is to just give an opinion. Further, the success of your reflection papers depends on how beautifully you present personal thoughts for readers.Key To Writing A Personal Reflection:
The key to writing a good personal reflection is to stick hard to your response. By being in-depth, you need to be a little more creative while explaining your response. It must be different from others’ thoughts. In personal reflection chapters, knowing the key response-influencing factor can help remove the contextual errors in depth. The key response influencing factors include:- Experiences, opinions, beliefs or feelings
- Overlapping or contrasting thoughts
- Realistic vs hypothetical approach
- Emotional state
- Empathy or sympathy with the main characters.
The personal reflection story does not end here. Even though you have cross-checked all these factors in response, you still need to justify them. To put it in another way, you have to give a reason for each response from:
- Similar text
- Personal Life events
- Other’s life events or text
After all, constructing an in-depth reflection paper is a common point to be pondered. Though, there are a number of reflective cycles/ models or sample papers proposed in different time periods. But, in actual, they provide a general format for drafting a personal reflection paper in a few simple steps.
Reflective Models
An important way to write a personal reflection is to use different reflective models. There are many reflective models that guide step by step to draft reflective papers. A few important among them are:- Mezirow model of transformative learning [1981]
- Kolb reflective cycle (1984)
- Gibbs reflective cycle (1988)
- Schön model (1991)
- Atkins & Murphy model [1993]
- Driscoll model (1994)
- Rolfe et al’s Framework for Reflective Learning (2001)
- Brookfield model (2005)
- Johns’ Model for Structured Reflection (2006)
For drafting reflective documents, no doubt we have plenty of models. They all have different applications, pros, and cons. From the above models, let’s randomly pick one to get an idea of how they work.
Gibb’s Model Of Reflection:
Gibb’s model of reflection is a famous framework that helps to share personal experiences, thoughts and ideas in six cyclic steps. In general, the aim of reflective papers is to share personal experiences that can help even others to perform well. It helps either by telling what not or what to do in light of experiences.Gibbs suggests reflective writers start from the basic description of the experience. The experience set platform to express the feelings as well as emotions. After feelings, the other step is to evaluate the experience. Evaluation means to tell both good and bad about the experience. Explaining right or wrong remains insufficient many times, so we need to give a clear analysis after primary research. Here, the analysis aims to make sense of the situation. The process of describing the experiences almost ends here. Hence, the second step is to draw a conclusion out of it. Last but not least, action plans are suggestions about how other persons can deal with similar situations in the future.
Personal Reflection Chapter
The format for a personal reflection chapter also follows steps proposed by any of the reflective models. Further, in personal reflection chapters, you can get help from these points.Point # 1: Module Related Learning
In a reflective task, the first thing is module related learning. To put it in a simple way, you need to follow the module for the personal reflection chapter.Point # 2: Module Interlinkage
Another thing in personal reflective chapter crafting is module interlinkage. In short, reflection at this point deals with bridging the knowledge from the writer’s and others’ modules.Point # 3: Consideration of Relevant Theories:
Searching and linking the relevant theories to support an idea/thought or even real-life experiences are another important consideration in reflection. The inclusion of theories or models increases the authenticity of a personal reflection chapter.Point # 4: Real Word Impact:
Point three is good to give a literacy look to your personal reflective chapter. That’s why the addition of real-world impact can make it practical as well. Like, in MBA to craft a reflective chapter, the impact of strategies on future progress can include its realism.Point # 5: Self-learning
This point helps the writer to smoothly progress towards the conclusion or final thoughts. In other words, this is the time to ponder over minor details. It includes checking the ability to learn, grow or think development by module reading.As a recap, the one-sentence definition of reflection is to give a personal view. Though crafting details highly depends on the purpose of writing. But, key elements testing activities can help you to get closer to the purpose of writing. Further, the countable and effective cyclic reflective models outline the chapters to amaze the instructor. More, considering a few important points in the personal reflective chapter will add flavour to your success.
