Reflective writing for the

MA in Academic Practice

Types of How is reflective writing different from other

reflective academic writing?
writing in the
The main difference is that whilst in many kinds of academic writing, the
MA in evidence you use to support or construct they points that you make comes from
Academic published literature and research, in reflective writing, you also use another form
Practice of evidence – your own reflections on your experiences.
(MAAP) Just like when you use other kinds of evidence, we’ll
expect you to use your own reflections critically – so this
You might be asked might involve using research or theories to try to explain
to write about: things that you have observed, or explaining how your
own experiences are similar or different from what you
 Your experiences might expect from a particular theory or from a
of teaching published study.

 Your experiences In some academic writing (perhaps in your own subject

during the course area) you might not be able to use the first person (I) or
(for example, refer to feelings or emotions – these things are Ivanna Salgado,
Unsplash
tackling an as- encouraged in reflective writing.
sessment, work-
In reflective writing, you will therefore using your experiences as well as your
ing in a group) reading to engage with and analyse the ideas we discuss during the MAAP.
Contents

Borton’s model 2 Why do we use reflective writing in the MAAP?

Gibbs’s model 3
Our intention for all modules on the MAAP is that they will enable and empower
Manouchehri’s 4 you to develop your teaching and academic practice. We believe that one of the
model
best ways to do this is by reflecting on your current teaching practices – by
Brookfield’s lenses 5 including reflective writing as activities during the modules, or as part of some of
the assessments, we intend to assist this process by giving you the
Writing reflectively 5 opportunities and prompts for reflection. We know that all our participants are
studying our modules alongside many other responsibilities, and that reflection
Reflection table 6 is something that otherwise might easily slip down the priority list.

Other resources 7
 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

How do you reflect on your experiences?

You might regularly reflect as part of your professional practice, you might
have had to reflect as part of a previous course you studied, or you might
be completely new to reflection. If reflection is something you’re not used
to, often using particular models to help with reflection can be very useful.
If you’ve already comfortable with particular models or ways of reflecting,
you might want to stick to these – or you might want to try some new
models to see if they provide a slightly different perspective. The following
models could be useful to enable your reflections.
Faye Cornish,
Unsplash

Borton’s model of reflection

This model, from Terry Borton, is attractive by virtue of its simplicity. It centres around just three questions,
so it’s easy to remember and is especially good to prompt a quick reflection after an event, such as when
you finish a teaching session.

The questions are:

 What?
 So what?
 Now what?

The first question, ‘what?’ prompts you to think about the details of one of the key events that you’ve
experienced. The next question, ‘so what?’ asks you to think about why that event is significant and
analyse the reasons for it happening in that way. The final question, ‘now what?’, invites you to think about
what you’d change as a result of reflecting on your experience.

An example reflection using Borton’s model

Imagine that you came out of a seminar feeling annoyed. The ‘what?’ is that the back table
of students were chatting and laughing throughout. So what? Does this matter? Well, you
were concerned that it was disturbing other students, or that the noisy group might not have
been fully engaged with their learning. Your initial thoughts could just be that these students
Changes following are rude or trying to wind you up, but when you try and see things from their point of view,
reflection don’t you might wonder if the group didn’t fully understand what they needed to do, or if they
finished early and didn’t know what to do next. They possibly were even getting on with
have to be
things, and just enjoying what they were doing and didn’t realise it affected anyone else! So
revolutionary— your answer to ‘now what?’ might involve a few different strategies: reminding students of
small adjustments how their behaviour can impact others; spending more time checking understanding of
can be very class tasks; and making sure students know that you have extension tasks available.
beneficial In this example, the reflection resulted in quite a few possible changes to your teaching for
the next session. This doesn’t always have to be the case; it might be that making a very
small adjustment might result in a significant change in class behaviour. It’s also useful to
concentrate on the positive aspects as well as things that you felt could have gone better –
in the previous example, it seemed that most of the groups got on with the task as
envisaged, so it’s just as beneficial to acknowledge the reasons for things going well for
these students, even though our natural reaction is to focus on the students who aren’t
acting in the way we’d expect them to.
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 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

Gibbs’s and Borton’s

reflective models
One of the most frequently used models for
reflection on teaching is Graham Gibbs’s.
This can nicely map onto Borton’s model,
so that it is effectively giving you some sub
-questions to consider for each of Borton’s
three main questions. In this way, the
‘what?’ is expanded to ‘description [what
happened]’ and ‘feelings [your thoughts
and emotions]’; the ‘so what?’ is expanded
to ‘evaluation [the good and bad parts of
the situation]’ and ‘analysis [what sense
you can make of the situation]’; and the
‘now what?’ is expanded to ‘conclusion
[thinking about what else you could have
done]’ and ‘action plan [what you will do
differently next time]’.
Which style you find more productive is down to personal preference. You
might like the simplicity of Borton’s model, or you might like the extra prompts
from Gibbs. It’s useful to try them both out a few times to see which you get
on with best. Perhaps they work best in different situations – Borton for a Reflection is
quicker reflection, and Gibbs for when you want to spend more time thinking
about an event. never about
making a
single change
Reflection is cyclical and then
resting on our
One important aspect of both the previous models is their cyclical nature. Teaching
is something that can always be developed, especially as our students and their laurels
identities and needs are ever changing. So reflection is never about making a
change and then resting on our laurels, content in the knowledge that we’ve now
cracked this session and have created the perfect learning experience. Instead, it’s
about having a go at different approaches, seeing what works and what doesn’t to
enable improvements, and keeping on doing this.

The process of reflection, however, is certainly not meant to turn teaching into
something Sisyphean and overwhelming. You don’t need to review every single
moment you teach, nor do you have to take a whole new approach for each session
– not only would this give you a completely unsustainable workload, but it would
also be quite confusing for your students! Instead, reflective teaching is about taking
regular opportunities to think about what kinds of things are enabling learning, and
any issues that you are encountering, and then making some adjustments – often Andrew Wulf,
Unsplash
these can be quite small, such as making sure you greet your students as they
enter the room, or spending a little more time discussing assessment criteria.

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 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

Manouchehri’s reflective model

An alternative and more recent model is from Azita Manouchehri, who sees
reflection as storytelling – it’s part of our instincts as people to tell stories
about the things that happen to us, to make sense of them. She suggests
that reflections can be seen as adding different layers to the story, in effect
fleshing things out and adding more detail, in the same way that we might
storm back into our shared office, declaring ‘that’s it, I just can’t teach that
group anymore!’ before gradually letting our colleagues know what it is that’s
Robyn Budlender,
Unsplash upset us so much.

The layers that Manouchehri identifies are:

 Describing – telling the story of what happened

 Explaining – why it happened, bringing together similar incidents in

the explanation

 Theorising – the reasoning behind your explanation, which might

come from research and learning theories as well as your own
If we try to be
experiences
more open to new
ideas, we might  Confronting – trying to move away from your instinctive reactions or
experience real simple explanations – could there be other ways of looking at this?
Can you try and see things from your students’ perspectives? Are
change within there ideas in the research that you want to reject because they make
ourselves you feel uncomfortable - is there a reason for this? Do they challenge
some of your values or beliefs?

 Restructuring – how can you rearrange some of the elements of your

story, or add in something new, to make a different outcome next
time? This might mean making use of many of the original elements,
but weaving them together in a slightly altered fashion.

One of the key differences with Manouchehri’s model, and the reason it
might be particularly effective, is the notion of ‘confronting’. It’s sometimes
tempting to pay lip service to the notion of reflection, and to experience it as
a superficial activity. The most valuable reflections, however, are often the
ones where we try and move away from simplistic solutions, or ones which
reinforce our own assumptions about what teaching or learning might look
Kourosh Qaffari,
like. If we try to be more open to new ideas, we might experience real
Unsplash change within ourselves that can be a lightbulb moment in the ways we think
about education.

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 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

Brookfield’s four lenses

Another important aspect of the layers described by Manouchehri is that it
directly refers to moving outside of our own thoughts and incorporating some of
the research literature or others’ perspectives to expand our ideas about the
situation. In a similar way, Stephen Brookfield has suggested that effective
reflections incorporate four different lenses, or ways of looking at an event:

1. Our own experience

2. Putting ourselves in the shoes of our students ShareGrid, Unsplash
3. Discussing with colleagues to see what they have made of similar occurrences,
or their peer review of your teaching
4. Theory and research into the issues

If you’re doing a quick reflection after a session, you might not always be able to look at everything that
happens through all of these lenses. But if you’re repeatedly experiencing a particular problem, or are
struggling to make sense of something, then it can be really beneficial to expand your reflection in this
way.

You might want to

keep some sort of
How to move from thoughts to writing ‘reflective journal’
to enable you to
take time to
It might feel a bit intimidating at first to write reflectively – you might be uncertain pause, reflect and
about how much detail to include, or how to phrase things. There’s often several record after your
stages that you might go through between reflecting on an experience and writing teaching
about it.

First, you might want to prepare for your writing by collecting some of your
experiences. You might want to keep some sort of ‘reflective journal’ to enable you
to take time to pause, reflect and record after your teaching so that
you remember your thoughts and emotions. This doesn’t have to be
something formal – perhaps using a ‘Notes’ app on our phones to
record a few pertinent reactions after a teaching session.
Then you might want to go through an organising and selection
process to choose the most significant experiences or aspects of
your experiences for the writing you’re going to do. You might want
to organise this as a mind map, or use a table similar to the one
overleaf.

Jess Bailey, Unsplash

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 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

Reflection table
You might have been asked to write a forum post about using technology in your teaching, so
you could start filling a table with some of your recent experiences as follows:

Event/ experience Key emotions/ learning Links to theories/

points research

Using PollEverywhere for Was great to see people

the first time respond and almost every-
one take part. I found it a bit
difficult to know how long to
give people to respond.

Using breakout rooms in I was really frustrated that Gilly Salmon’s five stages?
Zoom so many people didn’t turn Research about building
up for the session so the communities?
groups I’d created had to be
redone. When I visited the
rooms, it seemed to take
people ages to get going
with the discussion and eve-
ryone went silent when I
came in.

Using Teams Feel very comfortable with

this software now and stu-
dents are happy with it.

From doing this sort of exercise, you can quickly begin to see which experiences might be
the most productive for further attention, so you can choose one of these to expand upon
(in the example above, it feels like the experience with breakout rooms could be a good
choice for reflection as there’s lots to think about – e.g. why might the discussions take a
while to get going, and how might the rooms be run differently?). Then, you can use a re-
flective model to enhance the richness of your thinking and provide you with prompts to
expand your analysis of the situation. At this stage, you might want to do some free writing
(which means just letting yourself write for a set period, e.g. five or ten minutes, without
worrying about how ‘good’ the writing is or whether it’s ‘academic’) just to help you record
your thoughts.

Once you have some material to work with you can then edit it to make it fit the
requirements of reflective writing for an MA course. Remember, one of the key things in a
reflection is to show that you’ve thought about the reasons for what happened, and what
you’ve learnt from the experience – what does your analysis of the situation, and relevant
theories or research suggest that you might do differently in the future?

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 Reflective writing for the MA in Academic Practice

What we look for in reflective writing for the MAAP

The most effective reflective writing that we see on our course:

• Isn’t too descriptive – it includes just enough description so that we can understand the context, but
most of it focuses on analysis. Remember, we don’t have to know everything about the course you teach
on or your students to understand the point you’re making!

• Collates experiences – so we can see if this is a common issue, or what the differences might have
been when you’ve taught the same class to different groups.

• Is a balanced account – some of the reflective writing you’re asked to do will be about your
experiences on the MAAP. It can be easy sometimes if you’ve had a frustrating experience to want to get
all of this out and blame other people – but we want to see where you might also take ownership of
situations where things haven’t gone well, or look for solutions to issues (that don’t involve you just
working with different people next time!).

Other places to look for help with reflective writing

Help with reflective writing at City:

https://studenthub.city.ac.uk/help-and-support/improve-your-study-skills

References:

Borton, T. (1970) Reach, Touch and Teach. London: Hutchinson.

Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff
and Learning Development. Available online at
http://www2.glos.ac.uk/gdn/gibbs/index.htm
Manouchehri, A. (2001) ‘Professional discourse and teacher change’, Action in Teacher
Education, Volume 1, pp. 89-115.
Manouchehri, A. (2002) ‘Developing teaching knowledge through peer discourse’, Teaching and
Teacher Education, Volume 18, Issue 6, August, pp. 715-737.

Guides:

https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/asc/documents/public/Short-Guide-Reflective
-Writinghttps://www.port.ac.uk/student-life/help-and-advice/study-skills/written-assignments/reflective-
writing-introduction

https://www.port.ac.uk/student-life/help-and-advice/study-skills/written-assignments/reflective-writing-
introduction

https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/reflective/writing

Page 7 Author: Jessica Clare Hancock, January 2021