About the site

Welcome to the Reflection Toolkit.

This is a place where you can find information and support whether you are looking to reflect yourself or facilitate reflection in others. 

Before you move on, you might want to take a second and ask yourself:

  • Why am I on this site?
  • What/who brought me here?
  • What do I want to take away from this site?
  • How will I know I have gotten what I needed?

You might really like answering this kind of question, or you maybe you don’t. In either case, if you took the time to think about the questions you will have started a reflection. Self-questioning like this, to better understand ourselves, our motivations, and our experiences, is at the heart of reflection.

You may very well know the process of reflection under different names, for example ‘reviewing’, 'analysing' or ‘processing’.

Below you can find the different sections that together make the Reflection Toolkit.

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Reflectors' Toolkit

This section is for people who want to reflect. You will find resources, models and questions that can help start your reflections and structure them.

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Facilitators' Toolkit

Considerations and information about implementing reflection in courses, workshops and other initiatives.

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Literature

This section contains a review of literature on reflection and a list of helpful literature to explore the area further.

Definition of reflection

For the purpose of this site, reflection or critical reflection is defined as:

the conscious examination of past experiences, thoughts, and ways of doing things.  Its goal is to surface learning about oneself and the situation, and to bring meaning to it in order to inform the present and the future.  It challenges the status quo of practice, thoughts, and assumptions and may therefore inform our decisions, actions, attitudes, beliefs, and understanding about ourselves.

 

Reflection can be used for many things including:

  • Allowing us to improve our own practice to gain better outcomes in the future
  • Increasing/improving our performance and skills
  • Increasing our awareness of our abilities and attributes and our evidence for these
  • Developing and expanding our employability
  • Evaluating the quality and success of our action plans
  • Applying theoretical knowledge/frameworks to real experiences and using this to expand our understanding of the underlying theory.

Questions, feedback and about us

If you have questions, didn’t find the things you needed, or have any feedback about the site - please email us at reflection@ed.ac.uk.

We want to help and are always looking to improve.

Lead authors Dr Gavin McCabe and Tobias Thejll-Madsen.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence. 

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