Reflective journals in college courses are spaces to document what you are doing and to consider the experiences as part of your learning. While reflective journals are and have been commonly used in classes such as Composition, they have become more popular in a broad array of college courses, even the sciences. This expanded popularity makes a lot of sense because the point of reflective journals is for students to consider their learning in deeper ways, a process more meaningful than memorizing information for tests. Reflective journals do allow students to look back at their work over a longer period of time, such as a semester, to help them remember useful concepts or information they have learned; however, the purpose of the journals goes beyond that. Ideally, reflective journals help students think about what they have learned and how the knowledge has impacted them as learners. This will probably mean the reflective entries are some combination of learning breakthroughs, where ideas become more clear, and learning struggles, where students have a diificult time with ideas, and a lot in between. Whatever the case, reflective journals should be spaces where students can write and feel okay with confusion, complication, and even failure. Working through those thoughts, along with the successes, through lower-stakes writing, is valuable to better understanding one’s individual learning.

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You might think that a reflective journal sounds a lot like a diary, and there is some overlap between the two. Both are chronological and used to record events; however, one main difference is in the purpose. Your Reflective Journal is a space for metacognition, that is becoming more self-aware about your thinking through writing, reading, and contemplation. Another difference is audience. Whereas a diary is a private document, think of your Reflective Journal as semi-private. You will write for youself as a main audience, but it can be helpful to your learning to share reflections with your instructor and perhaps even other students who might be able to converse with you, offer feedback, ask questions, etc.

Why do I have to keep a Reflective Journal in WRIT 100/101?

The Reflective Journal you’ll put together this semester is a devoted space for sustained reflection on your first-semester writing experience. You’ll use your Reflective Journal as a space to collect and unpack ideas independent of the essays and projects you have to submit for each unit. Hopefully, the journal will help you develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be an academic writer. As the writer, you will have full agency over the space. Your teacher will give you prompts and guidelines to work from, but you have ownership over what you write, how you write it, and how you contextualize it.

In a typical writing class, you might have a tendency to write a paper, submit it for a grade, and forget about it. Regardless of the grade you might have received, you learned something from writing that paper, but unless you reflect (and write about that reflection), there’s a good chance that you’ll lose a lot of what you learned over time. The Reflective Journal gives you a place to put all of your reflections. Also, you might use tags, comments, categories, and links to analyze trends in your reflective practice over time.

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