Core elements of reflection

What is reflection?

According to the University of Edinburgh Reflection toolkit website, “reflective practice examines our thoughts, actions and experience, and asks why they happened that way with the goal of improving ourselves or our understanding.” This section offers resources on how to incorporate reflection into course and programme design for the benefit of students.

Why is it important?

The link between learning and reflection has been well documented in academic literature, and many studies have shown that reflective activities for students, such as keeping a reflective journal, can reinforce their learning.

As a starting point, we highly recommend looking at the University of Edinburgh’s Facilitator’s Toolkit, which is part of the Reflection Toolkit, a website to help you implement reflective practice as part of your course. This resource highlights that embedding reflective exercises in course design can be beneficial for many reasons, including:

• Improving practice to gain better outcomes in the future;
• Increasing/improving performance and skills;
• Increasing awareness of abilities and attributes, and note evidence for these;
• Developing and expanding employability;
• Evaluating the quality and success of action plans;
• Applying theoretical knowledge and frameworks to real experiences.

Reflection is strongly intertwined with experiential learning and is often used as the assessment activity in experiential tasks. The section ‘Developing as a designer‘ also has some resources on how to reflect on your own teaching practice.

Next steps

Learn more about embedding reflection in your practice

Read, watch and listen to a range of additional resources about reflection