A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice

This chapter is the beginning of the more practical part of the book. The next three chapters are practically based and are designed to support work in education or professional development to enable learners to learn by way of reflective or experiential learning. There are a number of references to resources that are in the Resources section at the end of the book. This chapter is primarily concerned with reflective learning. Reflective learning itself is significant in formal education but it plays an important role in most experiential learning. For this reason, the content of the chapter may be used to support either activity.

The first of these practically based chapters concerns the introduction of reflective activities to learners. This is presented as a two-stage process, which is explained in the first section. Both stages consist of a range of activities and exercises and resources that are intended to help learners to understand what they need to do to manage reflective writing or reflective learning.

The approach is based on two observations that have practical implications for the introduction of reflective writing activities to students - we have referred to both earlier. First, just presenting learners with a task of writing a learning

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