a reflective essay is different from the traditional essay because in a reflective essay you were at the center of it rather than the theory which you might be summarizing and discussing in a traditional essay so reflective essay is about your learning is showing how you are developing reflective and critical skills and therefore the kind of questions you might be asking is how am i learning you'll be writing about particular events particular episodes and instance that happened in your workplace you'll be writing about what if some people start summarizing what people said and did and what you thought and says for what didn't happen and you'll be drawing on a learning journal if you've been keeping one which I hope you have but in a reflective essay you're exposing your own thinking and your own viewing of what's going on to a kind of a critical perspective so questions like offer my assumptions about this what surprised me what annoys me what was I thinking are there other explanations of what's going on are there ways of looking at this particular event of this particular series of events that might be quite different to mine that I'm not considering they're the kind of questions that underpin a good reflective essay so you're not only describing what went on you're not only asking questions about what went on and coming up with explanations but you're also subjecting your own thinking your own interpreting to a further set of questions so a reflective essay will essentially have a number of steps one is describe a series of incidents or episodes show the questions you're asking about that what went on why was this happening and so on what answers did you come up with that ecstatics provides some kind of explanation of what was going on and including that you're including a reflection on your own thinking how are you interpreting that where was that interpretation coming from the next step then is you try to make sense of it are there theories as their self that you read that help you understand and make sense of of what you're describing of the answers that you've come up with then you've got to test your answers is it true does it fish does it make sense how do I know and the final step then is to take all that together and say and show how you have learned over the period of the range of instance you're six months in the clown placement or you're three months on placement and said show me how you've learned not just what you've learned but how you've learned you.
