Reflective Writing: It’s NOT Busy Work

What Does Reflection Accomplish?

Reflection is a key strategy we use as teachers to help us access our prior knowledge and make connections across our teaching experiences. Accessing prior knowledge and making connections across information is absolutely essential if you want to network all of the new information and skills you are practicing into your long-term memory (Doyle & Zakrajsek, 2013).

Reflection is often billed as superficial busywork and we are often asked to do it in a going-through-the-motions way. If this is your previous experience with reflection, then it is important that you re-learn how to reflect in meaningful ways.

Reflection is built-in time and space to think, analyze, detect and discover connections you are making during busy, in-the-moment classroom happenings. In classrooms things happen quickly, and while a part of you acknowledges that something interesting, odd, or important happened, it can be difficult in the moment to know what it was or why some part of you said, “Hey, I need to pay attention to that!” This is where reflection becomes absolutely imperative to make sense of your experiences and improve your skills as an educator.

Additionally, in education if you cannot reflect, you cannot use feedback that has been given to you, you cannot make sense of complex teaching situations, you cannot grow as a teacher, and sometimes, when you really need to, you won’t be able to forgive yourself when you make mistakes.

“As teachers, we must forgive ourselves our humanity and realize that part of what we’re modeling for students is the ability to be flawed and effective. We’re modeling what happens when we fail, or when they fail at specific tasks” (Dark, 2017, p. 29). Mistakes are an important part of learning. You will make mistakes as teachers and reflection (as well as support from mentors and peers) can help you use your mistakes as a stepping stone to the next level of performance. 

Teachers are human, flawed, and as you will learn in this program, intimately intertwined in our own positionality based up upon race, class, ability, gender identity/expression, education, and culture. Reflection should be a place to ask critical questions about how our own experiences and biases may cloud or sharpen our judgment and perspectives in certain situations. Understanding and critically reflecting on the limits and benefits of our own beliefs, experiences, opinions, and actions can help us better connect to and support students who may have different backgrounds from ourselves.

For all of these reasons, reflection is key to being a lifelong learner and effective educator. Good reflection involves specificity, rich description, nuanced analysis and asking ourselves tough questions; that is, it goes BEYOND just telling what happened. In the SoE, you will develop and use your reflective skills through writing and speaking in almost every course.