Revisiting reflections

Reflecting immediately after an experience allows you to capture ‘hot feelings’

A great general tip for producing reflections is to consider your experience of a critical incident immediately after it happens to capture ‘hot feelings’. Hot feelings tend to be overwhelming like frustration, anger, or excitement and can shape your experience and thoughts of it.

This is valuable to capture as thoughts and feelings change over time and therefore so do our memories of events. Capturing your immediate reaction, for example as written notes or as a voice recording, allows you to access it later.

You may find that it is easiest to use ‘free-form’ reflection (see ‘Free-form reflection’) to do the immediate reflection or generally just capture and work through your thoughts and feelings in no systematic manner. Alternatively, you might find it easier to capture your first reflection using a structured approach and ask yourself a series of known questions, or work through a model.

Free-form reflection (within the Reflectors’ Toolkit) 

Use immediate reflections to inform later reflections

Revisiting your immediate reflections and notes as a basis for later reflections when the feelings have cooled down can help you to remember how you felt at the time. The distance can help you to put the situation into context and identify general learning points without being too biased by any initial strong emotions.

Similarly, by capturing and revisiting immediate reflections, you do not risk misremembering details or retelling yourself the story so often that the details change. For example, you might not think of yourself as an angry person, and therefore if you wait too long after a situation where you felt angry, you might remember it as you being mildly annoyed because it fits your own idea of yourself better.

When you revisit reflections, it might be helpful to use a more systematic manner than the immediate reflection, for instance by using a reflective model. However, free-form reflection can also easily be used if that works better for you.

Using both initial and later reflections can help you surface more learning and thereby get more out of an experience. This is valuable whether or not you are reflecting for personal gain or for a course, and is appropriate regardless of the way you reflect – for example in writing, by yourself, or with others.

Where next?

The other pages in ‘Producing reflections’ provide further guidance and ideas to help develop your approach to reflection.

Producing reflections (within Reflectors’ Toolkit)

When producing reflections you can either choose a structured or free-form approach, or a combination of the two.

Within any type of reflection you can choose to adapt a very structured approach and use models (see ‘Reflecting on experience’), or you might want to use free-form reflection. The latter allows your mind to run free. See ‘Free-form reflection’ for below for information on this.

Reflecting on experience (within Reflectors' Toolkit)

Reflections often fall on a spectrum between structured and free-form

Some people might prefer a lot of structure and, especially if you have never reflected before, using models to start can be helpful. Other people prefer just to start thinking and see where each tangent takes them.

Both can work as a pure form, either answering questions methodically and to the point, or just allowing words to flow, but often people and reflections can benefit from using both.

For instance, you might start with a model and read the relevant questions and descriptions for each of the areas. Now, with an idea of the sorts of things that go in a particular area, you freely reflect and explore everything and every tangent you can think of for that area. Then you simply repeat that process for each step in the model.

By using a model you ensure that you touch on each aspect that is important for producing and presenting reflections, but you don’t limit yourself to answering a particular set of predefined questions.  

Personal reflections do not require structure, while reflection for others often does

Reflection that you produce for others to read typically has an expected shape or structure. This is particularly seen if the reflection needs to be assessed. If that is the case, make sure you are aware of any structural, and other, requirements.

Even if you prefer to reflect in a certain way, make sure that you either use the proposed structure for the reflection process, or at least represent your reflections using that framework. That is, you might be asked to use a particular model, but you prefer to reflect without structure; therefore you might capture your reflection in whichever way you like and then rework it to fit the structure.

However, keep in mind that trying out different techniques may help you develop and grow in your reflective practice.

In contrast to reflections for others, when doing any kind of personal reflection, you can be as creative, free, unstructured, or structured as you want to be. That being said, personal reflections, in whatever shape or form, should  include a purposeful examination of thoughts and practice to be defined as reflection.