Insert Name of Service Learning Course Here

Reflection Writing Assignment Sheet

Guidelines for Writing Reflection Papers

The goal of writing reflective papers is to develop your capacity to learn from experience, which some argue is a central element of leadership and professional development.

Learning from experience requires the ability to:

1) Be Mindful. This means being observant of what is happening in a situation, even when you are an active participant in that situation. It also means having a deeper sense of self-awareness. Reflective should result in your having a greater awareness of things like: who you are, what your strengths are, what you are in the process of learning and how you are perceived by others.

2) Make Connections. You need to be thoughtful about how your observations of situations and awareness of your self relates to our course topics. Reflection papers are not free-flow personal journals, but well-reasoned papers that show depth of thought about the connections between scholarly work and your own lived experience.

A few important points about reflection writing:

  1. Making an observation or stating an opinion is not the same as reflecting.

A good reflection paper does not simply relate an experience or declare a personal belief. While it may include these elements, it must go much deeper. Use examples and evidence to support your points. Identify the assumptions you are making, question them, and explore where they have come from. Apply what you are learning in this course to explain the situation or analyze your beliefs.

  1. Make reflection a habit.

Learning to be a reflective practitioner and lifelong experiential learner is a habit I hope you’ll gain in this course. I recommend you free-write a brief weekly reflection after your contact hours, when your observations and thoughts are fresh. Jot down experiences that stood out to you or questions you want to ask your site supervisor about. These thoughts will be useful for class discussions and will result in reflection papers that are both higher quality and easier to write.

  1. When writing about potentially sensitive topics (e.g. explorations of racism, classism or sexism or critiques of your service site or of the material presented in class), do your best to be respectful, but don’t avoid controversy by just not writing about the issue.

If you catch yourself thinking, “Oh I shouldn’t say that,” that is exactly what you should write about. Be brave and write it. Then write about why you initially considered avoiding the topic.What are you wrestling with?

  1. Start by free-writing whatever comes to mind, then go back and gather your thoughts together into a well-organized paper.

If you find yourself struggling to know what to write about, try responding to one of the following prompts. (Note: you are not required to specifically address any of these topics. They are provided only to help you get a start). Once you have some thoughts on paper, go back and make choices about the ideas you will focus on, and decide how you present them so that your thoughts have a clear flow.

  • Describe a specific moment at your site that struck you. What happened? What do you think it means about your organization or the social issue it addresses? What did you learn from it? Papers that analyze one or two moments or issues typically have more depth than those that try to convey every interaction the student has had on site.
  • What connections do you see between your experience at the site and the topics we have read about and discussed in class? What does the organization staff think about some of our class topics? How is reality similar or different to what is shared in textbooks and what important lessons can be drawn from that?
  • What learning competencies from this course do you observe the staff and volunteers at your site drawing from as they do their work? Are you learning these competencies? How? How might you be more intentional about creating learning opportunities for yourself?
  • What themes can you identify as major points of learning for you? By reviewing your weekly reflections can you identify areas of development or areas in which you have changed your mind?

Note: Here I typically insert the specific topic areas I would like each reflection paper to explore – these are reflective of the course content that will have been covered when each reflection paper is due, and what course topics I want the students to connect to the service experience. - Wendy

Expectations and Evaluation

Please know that at 3-4 pages, these length requirements are considered quite short given the amount of information that should be conveyed. Plan to revise at least a few drafts in order to have a tightly written paper that is concise, makes your main points clear and uses examples and evidence to support them. The quality of your writing (overall structure and flow, grammar, spelling) is reflective of the complexity of your thinking. Please proofread.

Reflective writing will be evaluated on the extent to which it demonstrates that you are learning from your experience. It should provide evidence that you have been a careful observer during your experiences and have given considerable thought to making meaning of what those experiences teach you. Reflection papers should articulate the connections you are making between the on-site experience and our class discussions, assigned readings, the learning competencies and your prior experience.

The following rubric will be used to evaluate this work.

Rubric for Assessing Service-Learning Reflection Papers
Excellent / Good / Average / Poor
Reflection / Clearly ties personal knowledge, attitudes and behaviors into the paper. Clearly draws the relationship between self, class topics and service experience. / Fulfills basic criteria. Needs some additional work/articulation to draw the relationship between self, class topics and service experience. / Content is vague or does not clearly express a point of view. Does not create a strong sense of purpose. / Reflection paper inadequately or incorrectly completed.
Demonstration of Knowledge / The paper demonstrates that the author fully understands and has applied concepts learned in the course to analysis of the service experience. / Some reference to course readings/discussions/ experience. / Few references to course readings/discussions/ experience. / Little/no reference to course readings/discussions/ experience.
Depth of Discussion / In-depth discussion & elaboration. Utilizes appropriate reasoning and evidence/examples to explain point of view. / Reasonably well supported arguments with some elaboration. / Some discussion; little elaboration or illustrations. / Paper just covers points without elaboration or illustration.
Cohesiveness / Ties together information from prior experience, readings and service. Writing flows through an organized set of ideas. / Paper follows discernable logic flow and incorporates some class readings and experiences. / Thought process is difficult to follow. / No discernable logic flow; discussion points are not related or not in any particular order.
Spelling, Grammar, Mechanics / No spelling and/or grammar mistakes. / Some editing required for grammar, sentence structure, or organization. / Writing errors distract or impair readability. / Writing errors repeatedly distract reader.

Wendy Wagner, Center for Leadership and Community Engagement

George Mason University