Reflective writing can serve as a powerful tool to help students cultivate critical thinking, self-awareness, and a deeper connection to learning. We think of reflective writing as students thinking, talking, and writing about their learning experiences in a way that helps them to work with more agency and independence. This sort of thinking and writing can be powerful at any point in the learning process, and it can be especially useful at the end of units.
What is Reflective Writing?
Reflective writing is any type of writing that invites students to reflect on their own experiences, and examine their thoughts, feelings, responses and actions during the learning process. Drawing on the research and work of John Hattie and Zaretta Hammond, we know helping students to be independent learners requires them to be aware of their learning processes, and to develop skills and strategies for how they might move forward when they encounter learning challenges.
Reflective writing is distinct from other genres of writing because it is drawn entirely from the learner’s experiences. It’s typically first-person writing. In Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Brown, Roediger, III, and McDaniel suggest offering prompts such as “What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge and experiences does this remind you of? and What other strategies might you use next time to get better results?” These prompts promote metacognition and reflective thinking.
Examples of Reflective Writing in the Classroom
To incorporate reflective writing into your reading or writing classroom, you can consider natural points to invite students to pause and reflect on their learning process.
Invite a mid-workshop reflection: Pause students mid-way through class, and ask open-ended questions that get kids to think: What’s gone well so far? How much progress have you made? What do you need to move forward in their work? For example, midway through a reading workshop, you might ask students to think, “What’s working well for me today when it comes to my reading stamina?” Then, you could channel students to identify one goal that will drive their work moving forward.
Facilitate an End-of-Class Share: Add occasional shares at the end of writing workshop or reading workshop focused on reflection. You might facilitate peer discussions where you channel students to reflect on the learning from the day. Students could give each other a tour of their notebooks, or share a moment from class that was tricky and how they moved forward.
Invite reflection when students are stuck: When students are stuck, ask them to reflect on prior moments they’ve been stuck and how they moved themselves forward in their learning. You might connect this critical reflection to students’ everyday lives outside of school. For instance, you might ask, “What do you do when you’re stuck in your video game? Could any of those same strategies help you in this situation?”
Create space for reflection after kids finish important projects: After students finish revising and editing a piece of writing, or after book clubs finish a book or research groups finish a report, you could invite students to reflect. What are they most proud of? What was most challenging for them in completing this? What feedback did they receive along the way that was most useful to how they completed the project? To make this feel more fun, you might invite students to present their learning in a gallery walk, and write a reflection like a museum tag or an artist statement to accompany it!
Invite students to reflect at the end of a unit: After finishing a unit, create a space for students to reflect on their learning and growth. For instance, students could compare their narrative on-demand assessment from the beginning of the unit to the assessment they do at the end of the unit. Additionally, the end of units can be a great time for you to get feedback on your teaching! You might give a survey asking students to reflect on their favorite part of the unit, the most helpful feedback you gave them, and ideas for how to make the next unit even better.
Benefits of Reflective Writing for Elementary Students
Reflective writing can help strengthen kids' self-awareness skills and emotional intelligence. Being an independent reader or writer requires students to develop the ability to persevere through frustration and find strategies to move forward when they’re stuck. By inviting students to reflect on and share how the learning is going for them, you are channeling them to take agency over their learning lives and helping them to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Reflective writing assignments can foster creativity and personal expression, since students can write reflectively in a variety ways, developing their own writing styles. For instance, students might jot brief notes, write a longer narrative retelling their experiences with a particular project, respond through poetry, or even sketch and label a response.
Reflective writing also provides opportunities for students to self-assess and evaluate their own work, and for students to set goals that will drive their work moving forward. In his book Visible Learning, John Hattie synthesizes over 2,000 meta-analyses related to student achievement to determine the high-yield influences that especially accelerate growth. He found that among the top factors that accelerate growth are students engaging in self-assessment, what he calls producing self-reported grades, with an effect size of 1.44. One of the reasons self-assessment is such a powerful academic skill is that it can help children to be more metacognitive about their own learning.
Importantly, reflective writing can help teachers to strengthen and outgrow their current practices, as teachers reflect on which learning experiences are most impactful for students and get students suggestions for what could be improved.
Tips for Implementing Reflective Writing in the Classroom
Reflective writing can look different in different grades! In order to create a supportive environment, encourage self-reflection, and celebrate students’ efforts and achievements, you can differentiate what reflective writing looks like by grade-band.
Grades K-2: Channel students to use drawings and oral descriptions as precursors to writing reflections.
Grades 3-5: Introduce structured reflective prompts that guide students to write about specific experiences, and invite students to orally rehearse their ideas before drafting!
Grades 6-8: Encourage longer, independent reflective writing on a wider range of topics. Just like in the lower grades, encourage students to talk through their ideas! Then, invite students to draft, edit, and revise their ideas.
To help students with these different types of reflection, and to boost accessibility, you might use visual aids to remind students what they are working on! Point to the anchor chart, provide a checklist, or provide a list of sentence stems to help them share ideas, reflect, and write.
How to Assess Reflective Writing
In reflective writing, you can highlight the importance of focusing on growth and process, rather than outcomes or correctness. As students write, watch them! Who has a lot to say? Who needs more support? Just as you invite students to use reflective writing to reflect on their learning, you can also get meta and invite students to reflect on their reflective writing! You might encourage self-assessment and peer feedback.
Throughout the process, constructive feedback is important! Just like in the other genres of writing, you can develop mentor texts, checklists, and rubrics as criteria to help students evaluate their work and track how their reflective writing grows. Constructive feedback helps students both to grow their reflective writing skills and to build their ability to reflect on their own learning journeys.
Interested in Learning More?
To learn more about reflective writing, as well as other ways you can incorporate writing across the curriculum, sign up to attend our virtual Saturday Reunion on Saturday, October 5. It’s a powerful day of professional development, with dozens of free workshops for teachers and administrators across grades K-12, many of which will focus on writing.
