Reflective Practice
Student Activities have a whole host of benefits, helping you network, make new friends, connect you with local communities as well as benefits on your physical and mental health. Alongside all of these positive benefits, it's also important to recognise that this experience can be a great addition to your CV and employability too.
When involved in a student group, whether on the committee or just as a member, you're likely to have experienced a variety of new situations as well as challenges, which have helped you develop new skills and competencies.
However, you may not be aware of this development if you haven't taken the time to reflect on your experiences, so this section of the Employability covers why reflection is important and how you can incorporate reflection into making the most of your extra-curricular experiences.
You can navigate to relevant sections using the contents below:
Why is Reflection important?
Reflection helps to enable a better awareness of oneself, knowledge and understanding and skills and competencies. Within your role, you may find you’ve been volunteering for multiple years within the same role, carrying on doing things in the same way as you have always done them. However, reflection adds a stage to help you review the effectiveness of those practices. Similarly, reflection helps with self-awareness, through evaluating what we did, and if we need to learn anything from our own actions and the outcomes that resulted from those actions.
How does Reflecting boost my Employability?
Without reflecting on experiences, you’re less likely to be able to draw out the learning and development you gained from a certain experience.
During an interview, a common interview format is a ‘Competency based interview'. Competency based interviews often ask candidates a situation question, such as ‘Can you tell us about a time when you had to deal with a difficult situation’. These questions require the interviewee to reflect on a specific situation they have experienced and show how they have demonstrated a core competency the interviewer is looking for in the candidate, in this instance being dealing with a difficult situation.
The C-A-R model is an effective way to structure your answers, and requires you to reflect upon past experiences and the skills and knowledge gained. This model can be used to guide your reflective process on experience. C-A-R stands for:
Context: Briefly describe the context of your experience
Action: Explain what actions you took
Results/Reflection: Explain what happened as a result of your actions and any reflections on such actions
Reflective Learning Theory
“It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost. It is from the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalisations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalisations that allow new situations to be tackled effectively”. - Graham Gibbs.
Gibbs is well known for his 1988 model to give structure to learning from experiences. The model covers six stages also shown in the diagram below:
Description of the experience
Feelings and thoughts about the experience
Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
Analysis to make sense of the situation
Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future or general changes you might find appropriate
Gibbs G (1988). Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit. Oxford Polytechnic: Oxford.
The University of York's reflective practice skills guide goes into further detail on using reflective practice and information on how to reflect using Gibbs' Cycle.
Putting Reflection into Practice
Here are some suggested methods you could use to reflect.
60 second reflection:
Reflect as a group at the end of a session ask randomly or for a volunteer to discuss a highlight of a session, or one thing they learnt
Record one to three words to describe how a recent activity went, or how you feel about the project.
10 minute reflection:
Highlight a skill/competency you felt you developed from a certain activity, and use the C-A-R model to reflect on what you did, the actions you took and the results of those actions.
30 minute reflection:
Use the Gibbs model, to journal how a certain experience went.
Longer term reflective projects:
Write a letter to yourself at the beginning of your experience - such as at the start of the academic year, and outline any expectations and goals for the year to review and reflect upon in the future.
Journal after each session to debrief and to cement reflective practices into a regular task.
Use the end of year report to reflect upon volunteering experience to pass down to future committees and highlight your achievements throughout the year.
Need some more inspiration on how to reflect? Check out these tasks and templates from the University of York.
