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Reflecting is a key skill that we often use without realising - it is therefore useful to actively check-in with yourself and give yourself a structure to reflect with. This can help you become better at reflecting and knowing what to do with your reflections. A lot of your employability journey will require you to reflect, and sometimes answering questions isn't enough to help you feel confident about your own development. The activity below provides you with a summary of different reflection models and then suggests some other activities that you can use with these techniques to help you make the best progress with your employability journey.
Reflective Practice
Reflective Practice
You can find more information about 'Reflective Practice' on the 301 Academic Skills Centre page here.
Knowing how your current experiences can benefit your future experiences is a really useful skill for your employability journey. It will help you in your professional life, allow you to make the most of your degree experience, and help you understand the impact of your personal development on your employability. Reflection is an individual process and therefore it can feel intimidating to know where to start. We will all reflect on all aspects of our lives but knowing how to reflect in an effective way, and knowing how to apply these refelctions to influence your employability journey, can be easier to do when using a reflective model.
Below, you will find summaries of the different reflective models and links to other activities on this page where you can apply these models to help your thinking.
Reflective Models
Reflective Models
The models below are outlined in detail on the 'Reflective Practice' section of the 301 Academic Skills Centre page - you can find the Google Document links on each model heading. The university has highlighted these models as particularly useful during your university experiences. You can apply these models to your personal, professional, and academic development, all of which impact your employability journey. Read through each summary, explore the Google Document, and answer the questions below.
This model is very structured and useful in academic writing. You can also use it to reflect on experiences you have had outside of your academic work. The steps are a cycle and promote reflection from describing an experience to what you would do differently, leaving you in the best position to reflect again based on what you have learnt. Here are the stages of the cycle:
Describe an experience.
How did it make you feel?
Evaluate the expereince.
Analyse the experience.
What conclusions can you draw?
What will you do differently next time?
You could use this model to reflect on your goals, an employability event/workshop you attended, an experience where you developed a new skill, or an application/interview process to learn what you might need to do differently next time.
This model was originally designed for medical practice, but its simple structure makes it a useful reflective practice for when you want to reflect quickly and effectively in the moment. By reflecting in the moment, you are able to evaluate your experience, your responses, and how you have learnt. The structure is as it sounds, you ask yourself:
What? What happened/how did you react?
So what? How do you feel?
Now what? What have you learned?
This model is useful during experiences, such as reflecting during a day of work experience or reflecting on how you feel while writing an application or job hunting. This can help you make changes in the moment and apply what you have learnt straight away. This in itself is a very useful skill and an experience you could talk about during a job application/interview.
This model focuses on how you can reflect and learn from an experience. This is useful when you want to reflect and act on what you have learnt and then start the reflection process again. This cycle allows you to embrace the act of reflection as a tool to learn from and develop. The stages of the model are:
Concrete experience - this is where you describe your experience.
Reflective observation - this is where you reflect on how the situation happened and whether it went well and what didn't go well.
Abstract conceptualisation - this is where you analyse why you know it went well or didn't go well and where you reflect on any feedback.
Active experimentation - this is where you create a plan to put this learning into action.
This reflective practice offers you a chance for in-depth reflection where you can really understand what happened, why it happened, what you learnt, and how you can put this into action. This might be useful when you are reflecting on a work experience so that you can feel confident explaining what you learnt and how this could be applied to other work scenarios in the future.
This model allows you to practice reflecting during an experience and reflecting on an experience. This can help you understand how reflecting and acting in the moment can help you make the most out of an experience and how this differs from reflecting after an experience and how this can help you in the future. This model has two stages:
Reflection-in-action - this takes place in the moment. This is where you think about what is happening, any immediate thoughts, feelings, and feedback you have, and how to act on these ideas.
Reflection-on-action - this takes place after the moment. This is where you consider what went well, what you would improve on, and why this might be the case. You can then reflect on how you can learn from this and apply these reflections to future experiences.
Questions about these models:
Questions about these models:
When might you use each of these models?
Are there any models that feel like they will be particularly useful?
When might you use these models in your employability journey?
How might these models help your employability?
Why might feeling confident in your reflective practices be a valuable skill for a future employer?
After reading through all the models, what would your advice be to someone who is looking to get better at reflecting?
Why might you reflect during your degree experience?
Why might you reflect on your personal life?
Why might you reflect during your professional development?
Where to Use Your Reflective Practices
Where to Use Your Reflective Practices
When you add to your 'My development experiences' section on your mySkills profile
By completing this activity, you will have used these SGAs:
Growth Mindset
Positive Mindset
Defining Purpose
Self-awareness
Adaptable
Communication
Integrity
Problem Solving
Critical Thinking
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