Reflection with practitioner students

Case study by Jane Ching (Nottingham Trent University) outlining the use of reflective writing on postgraduate courses aimed at practitioners at Nottingham Law School.

A substantial piece of reflective writing, whether in the form of a final reflective report or an ongoing log, portfolio or journal, is a feature of the majority of courses offered by the professional division of Nottingham Law School. Courses include an MBA in Legal Practice Management and an LLM targeted at intellectual property professionals.

This case study concentrates on a group of postgraduate diploma courses operating under the umbrella of ‘advanced litigation’. Graduates from all these courses may proceed onto an LLM in Advanced Litigation. All are part time, involving students attending in blocks of two to five days over a period of one or two years for the diploma stage and a further year for the LLM. (There is also a period of ‘writing up’ of the dissertation component of the LLM.)

The first cohort of students entered the LLM in Advanced Litigation in 1994. Hence the use of reflective writing in this context is rapidly approaching its tenth anniversary.

The aims of the reflective writing component are to enable practitioner students to:

1. Evaluate and personalise learning derived from an advanced level simulation-based course.
2. Develop and employ strategies to improve learning and personal development from experiences in their own day to day practice.

These aims are in accordance with the Nottingham Law School faculty learning and teaching strategy, which contains a commitment to “a reflective approach to learning and professional development and a culture of lifelong learning”. The overall aim embodied in the specification for each course is to enable students to “evaluate and apply the tools and techniques of the reflective practitioner”.

It is a requirement of all the courses that students maintain a continuous piece of reflective writing, encompassing both reflections on activities during the formal class contact sessions and reflections on learning from the student’s personal practice. This now accounts for 50% of the student’s final mark.

Students are introduced to the concepts of reflective practice and reflective writing in a number of ways, including oral presentation, recommended reading and exposure (with the permission of the authors) to successful examples submitted by earlier students. Many of the resources used in support are internally produced, however students have been referred to the work of Jennifer Moon and of Boud, Keogh and Walker.

The course team feels strongly that, in order to assist students in the discipline of maintaining their reflective writing over such a prolonged period, each student should have the opportunity to develop his or her own style. This could be a diary or journal, a self-designed form using, for example, the headings of Kolb’s learning cycle, or some other format. Submissions on video- or audio-cassette have not yet been received, but the course team would not necessarily have any objection in principle to students producing their work in this way (although, of course anonymous marking would be more difficult to achieve).

Students are asked to submit their work in progress for formative feedback on at least one occasion (and often more frequently) during each course, and are invited to seek informal feedback on other occasions if they wish to do so.

Assessment

At the outset of each course students are provided with the course team’s markers guide using Bloom’s taxonomy. The flexibility of the format, and the invitation to students to derive learning from their day to day practice, mean that students can not only focus on aspects of the course which are of specific relevance or interest to them, but can also can employ the same techniques to derive conscious and reasoned learning points from their day to day practice.

Observations and remarks

• some students are natural reflectors and others are not
• the potential personal ‘exposure’ of reflection can be uncomfortable and, particularly for international students, contrary to cultural norms
• for a busy practitioner, the discipline of writing on a regular basis can be difficult to inculcate
• the use of reflective submissions as an adjunct to normal student evaluation mechanisms should not be underestimated

Last Modified: 4 June 2010