Reflective Essay Assessment Guidance

“Reflective practice is the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning, which is one of the defining characteristics of professional practice. Reflective practice is an important tool in professional learning settings where individuals learn from their own experience.” (SCoR, 2016)

Engaging in reflective practice is associated with the improvement of the quality of care, stimulating personal and professional growth and closing the gap between theory and practice. The difference between routine thinking and reflective thinking is that the former is static whereas the latter involves a willingness to learn and change by purposefully going through events sometime after they have occurred. Reflection is the process of looking back on what has been done, pondering on it and learning lessons from what did or did not work. The relationship between you and your placement mentors/assessor should provide regular opportunities for you both to reflect on your performance; we can therefore assume that daily work‐based supervision and assessment both contribute to reflective practice.

In order to support your essay it is suggested that you keep a reflective diary. This will enable you to jot down events and your feelings about them on a daily/weekly basis, and then provide you with evidence from which to complete the essay.

Assignment

Using Johns Model of Reflection construct an essay to demonstrate your reflections on your placement learning to date, specifically using your Staged Assessment experience as a critical incident.

Word Count: Must not exceed 2000 words Submission

Content Your essay should use the following structure:‐ •

Introduction: Offer the rationale for reflective practice in placement learning, and introduce the reflective model.

• Main Body (Johns Model of Reflection)

o Description of the Experience o

Reflection

o Influencing Factors

o Could I Dealt with It Better

o Learning

• Conclusion/Action Plan: Offer an evaluation of your learning from this critical incident, and what you intend to action as a result of this. (What could I have done better? What do you need to do now? What is your plan to achieve this?)

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You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.