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 might not. 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.

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Reflectors' Toolkit

Resources, models and questions to help you reflect.

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Facilitators' Toolkit

Implementing reflection in courses, workshops, and other initiatives.

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Literature

Review of literature on reflection and further reading.

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:

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

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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