Reflective writing

Monday 20th April

Reading ‘Development of student skills in reflective writing’ by Terry King and realising the change in academic emphases since the 1970s … Reflective writing, critical thinking and analysis were the province of the humanities, but not often translated to generalised self-reflective practice. More ‘real-world’ problem-solving and critical thinking was employed in the sciences, but not general reflective practice. In this context, Sydney Uni Italian exam papers under Professor Fred May, famously idiosyncratic at the time, represented good reflective practice. Students were required to pose and answer their own question which no doubt required more rigorous thinking than analysis of set questions.
30 years later, King has documented work with staff and students of Portsmouth Uni UK, implementing national postgraduate learning requirements with students of the sciences. Reflective writing, to be valuable, requires not only evidence of reflection on past and future action, and proposed problem-solving, but also evidence of ‘moving on’: revisiting reflection, incorporating and applying learning, transferring principles to new problems or creative propositions (transformative learning). Biggs, still publishing in 1999, seems to have exercised a key influence on learning theory since his 1956 ‘Taxonomy of Learning’. Extended abstract thinking, transformative learning, deep learning: all expressions of graduate learning goals for evaluating ‘overall work effectiveness’.