A Reflective Journey: Lessons, Growth, and Action Plan Assignment Sample

A Reflective Journey: Lessons, Growth, and Action Plan

Are you in search of the best assignment help in the UK? Look no further than Native Assignment Help. We understand the challenges you may encounter during your academic journey, which is why we're here to alleviate your burdens. Our website is user-friendly, and our customer support team is available around the clock to assist students. Let Native Assignment Help provide quality services and relieve your academic stress today! Additionally, explore our free assignment sample for a comprehensive understanding of our work.

Introduction: A Reflective Journey: Lessons, Growth, and Action Plan

A reflective essay is a summarization of the various experiences that have been gained throughout the study. A reflective essay helps an individual to understand all the experiences and the learning opportunities that have been provided and then to view the actions and implementations they have taken towards the same. This reflective essay will provide a deep discussion and understanding of the overall course period of the module and classes that have been taken. The reflective essay will also provide a discussion on the various elements that gather to summarise the overall experience using relevant theory. Several elements within a reflective essay provide the individual score for development and improvement over the past decisions and actions that have been taken for similar situations in future. Lastly, the reflective essay will also recommend certain elements that can be undertaken to nurture a better opportunity for the future. Thus it can be clear from the discussion that the overall aim of this given reflection is to share my knowledge and personal experience while learning the given module.

Main Body

After taking classes in the course work, it has been realised that there have been several opportunities provided to me that can be nurtured in a better way which would have provided me with a better plan of action for my future. While summarising the overall experience that has been gained throughout the course work providing the same, it is noticed that there have been certain instances where poor design-making and lack of critical thinking have led to missing opportunities. Further reflecting on the actions that have been implemented throughout the course work and following up on the results, it is evident that based upon the daily journal, I have taken poor designs that have led to poor consequences and have provided me with a lot of trouble. This reflective essay will be guided using Gibb’s reflective model, which uses five elements to provide a brief reflective summary of the overall experience that has been gained throughout the course work. These six elements will help in summarising the overall actions and their implementations and will also allow scope for improvement in similar situationsinfuture. Now before going into the actual discussion on my learning, I will share my idea on what I have learnt about both design-making and critical thinking.

Now what I have learnt about design-making is that Configuration-making or design-making is the most common way of making or fostering a plan for an item, framework, or administration. It includes steps that commonly incorporate exploration, conceptualization, prototyping, testing, and refining. Configuration-making can be applied in different fields, including modern plan, visual computerization, inside planning, and programming planning, among others. While studying this I also recognized that my objective in configuration-making is to make a plan that is practical, stylishly satisfying, and addresses the issues of the target group. This expects fashioners to consider different factors like convenience, availability, manageability, and social as well as communal variables. Configuration making could be moved toward in various manners relying upon the particular plan challenge as well as the inclinations of the person who design or configuration group. A few creators might utilize a more natural, iterative methodology, while others might follow a more organized, purposeful cycle. No matter what the methodology, successful plan-making requires cautious preparation, scrupulousness, and joint effort with partners and different individuals from the planning group. In that sense, I can say that I am more of a structured designer as I like to make my design process in an organized manner.

Now I will share my learning about my knowledge and understanding on critical thinking. According to my learning on critical-thinking what I have learnt is that it is a course of breaking down, assessing, and orchestrating data to settle on good decisions and choices. It includes utilizing thinking and rationale to look at the proof, distinguish suspicions and inclinations, and assess contentions and cases. I also learnt that Powerful decisive reasoning requires various abilities, including:

• Investigation: the capacity to separate complex data into its part parts and analyse the connections between them.
• Assessment: the capacity to survey the validity and pertinence of data, as well as the qualities and shortcomings of contentions and proof.
• Induction: the capacity to reach coherent determinations in light of accessible proof.
• Translation: the capacity to comprehend and make sense of the significance of data, as well as its ramifications and results.
• Clarification: the capacity to lucidly and precisely impart one's thinking and ends.

Now in the coming parts of the study I will be explaining a bit about my understanding in Gibbs reflective cycle and will be using this model to explain my personal reflection.

The Gibbs reflective cycle was introduced by Graham Gibbs in 1998 to make learning from experience easier. This effective cycle uses six elements and forces descriptions about them using a framework that can be used for examination that has been given throughout the coursework (The University of Edinburgh, 2023). These six elements are discussed below, along with the interpretation of the experience that has been gained.

• Description: Throughout the overall course work, I have experienced and participated in various workshops, interviews, debates and other academic and non-academic activities that have led to the improvement of my life skills and communication skills. The whole course work and the module were to improve the subject knowledge and gain experience that can be nurtured further in the professional and personal life (Travers, 2022). The whole experience was curated from the daily reflective journal that has been written by me, which explains all the activities and actions that I have taken throughout the day during my coursework in the institution. The whole course work was meant to develop a keen interest and knowledge in the subject that has been chosen for the studies and implementation of the same in my professional life and career as he provides me with better opportunities and results. Considering the improvement in my academic activities I can say that this module has helped as well as provided a lot of idea on how to do complete an assignment properly. In addition to this it has also helped me in identifying how to do proper referencing and how to structure an entire assignment. On the other hand, considering the non-academic activities this module has helped me in developing my interpersonal skills like getting social with the team, doing proper team work and also assisted me in developing my communication skills in a lot better way.
• Feelings: During the period of the course work, I felt very anxious and nervous as the overall module was tough to understand, and the event offered to develop interest and knowledge in the same. The nervous feeling was also a period of excitement to learn new things from the coursework that would help me in developing a better career in future. The feelings were mixed as it was my first time attending anything like this, which also provided me with an opportunity to investigate my skills and capabilities and work on them to improve the same. Not doing so would have provided me with a lack of opportunities and poor results in future. And excited at the same time helped me in stabilising myself to clearly understand all the activities and classes that were taken to provide me with a brief understanding of the subject matter along with developing and making a strong foundation to understand similar situations and implement them in my life. Also considering the feeling I always feel that the goal of a person’s life can be achieved if that person is focussed so considering this it will be important for me set proper goals so that I can achieve my set target.
• Evaluation: In the coursework, while evaluating the capabilities and skills that I already had in myself and developing a stronger base for understanding the subject, I found myself to be capable of doing the same. The valuation of my skills and capabilities led me to investigate and find out the mistakes and weaknesses that I had. While doing so, I found my communication skills to be strong enough to clear out any doubt in the class or during module learning. However, I found myself to be poor in areas of decision-making and critical thinking abilities as I made many poor decisions which led to poor results and regrets. Further evaluation of my skills and availability found that I was also lacking in numerical capabilities and teamwork skills.
• Analysis: I lacked in many areas during my module and academic tenure; however, I found myself to be strong in the areas of time management and self-discipline. What is analyses that my critical thinking skills is not that much good and whenever I stand in a situation where need to take any decision for my team, I become nervous and anxious that directly impacts my design-thinking capabilities. These skills and capabilities of myself help me understand the goals and objectives of the course work and to fulfil the same. I developed and improved the skills and capabilities that I already had myself and added a few new skills, such as teamwork which provided opportunities to work in teams and provide satisfactory results to even make my academic score better (Newman, 2020). Along with my academic results, I was also improving my co-curricular activities, such as taking participation in debates and other cultural activities that were happening in the institution during the course work.
• Conclusion: Concluding the overall reflective experience that has been gained throughout the module on the course work, it is to be noted that there have been instances where I was anxious and nervous because of new things and new activities that I had to participate in. However, that did not stop me from learning and developing knowledge at the same time while improving my skills and at the same time. The overall coursework helps me understand the importance of personal life skills and how they can benefit me in my professional career. Further, the overall coursework and the reflective journal that I kept every day helped me understand and notice the differences that I was making every day by developing and improving my thinking capabilities and critical decision-making (Chang, 2019). What I also conclude that nervousness and anxiousness both are part of developmental process and people need to go through both these factors so that they can understand that learning is not an easy process at all.
• Action plan: Usually an activity plan is identified as a kind of report that frames the particular advances or exercises expected to accomplish a specific objective or goal. A nitty gritty arrangement gives a guide to how to achieve a particular task or drive. The action plan that I will adopt to improve my skills and capabilities will also enhance my personal and professional career to understand the situations better than before. The action plan will include setting up objectives and goals that will improve my life skills and capabilities to make better decisions and nurture better and positive results each time. The setting up of objectives and goals will help me to be disciplined and focused on what to learnt and gain from the overall coursework (Kanade, 2021). It will help me to maximise the potential of learning and reflecting on my mistakes and positive actions that have been taken. The action plan will focus on future development, which will help me in scoring better in my academic tenure along with grabbing better opportunities in my professional career.

Conclusion

The reflective essay summarises the overall experience that has been gained through the module and the course work. Further, the reflective essay has also worked on the analysis and evaluation of the skills and capabilities that an individual can possess. Concluding the reflective essay, it can be said that the overall experience and reflective summary of the same helped in understanding the situation better and making the individual capable of handling similar situations with is in future. It has been understood that my personal and professional careers will benefit from the action plan I'll take to develop my talents and capacities since I'll be able to comprehend circumstances more clearly than before. The action plan will entail putting up goals and objectives that will enhance my ability to make better decisions and foster consistently improved and good outcomes in my life. Setting targets and goals will aid in my discipline and help me remain focused on what I want to learn and acquire from the whole programme. Overall, from the entire reflection it can be identified that achieving life goals is not an easy task and we need to work very systematically and methodologically to achieve those goals as discussed in the entire study.

Recommendations

From the overall reflection I have identified few shortfalls in my personal learning which I think can be rectified using the below mentioned recommendations.

1. It is recommended to set goals and objectives for the development of personal life skills and professional skills to grab better opportunities in the future and make better decisions, and hope for better results and outcomes from the same.
2. It is also recommended to use an action plan to summarise the steps and events that can take place to develop critical thinking and will help in gaining knowledge during the course work are themoduleperiod (Doyle, 2021).
3. It is also recommended to use reflective journals to have self-discipline and investigate to find mistakes and faults or areas that have a scope for improvement and can be done using help from the academic learnings or surroundings.
4. It is also suggested to use a SMART objective that will help in identifying what exact objectives needs to be achieved in a given frame work time.
5. Last but not the least in order to improve the critical thinking process it will be recommended to Figure out how to assess proof cautiously and basically. Taking into account the validity, significance, and dependability of the data and sources you experience.

References

Chang, B., 2019. Reflection in learninglearning. Online learninglearning, 23(1), pp.95-110.

Doyle, A., 2021. Important Life Skills That Employers Value. [Online] Available at: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/life-skills-list-and-examples-4147222 [Accessed: 24 February 2023]

Kanade, S., 2021. Life Skills in Higher Education. [Online] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/life-skills-higher-education-sneha-kanade/ [Accessed: 24 February 2023]

Newman, T.J., 2020. Life skill development and transfer: “They’re not just meant for playing sports”. Research on Social Work Practice, 30(6), pp.643-657.

The University of Edinburgh, 2023. Gibbs' Reflective Cycle. [Online] Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/gibbs-reflective-cycle [Accessed: 24 February 2023]

Travers, C.J., 2022. The Nature and Importance of Reflection and Keeping a Reflective Diary: What Can We Gain from Writing Reflectively About Our Goals? In Reflective Goal Setting: An Applied Approach to Personal and Leadership Development (pp. 47-62). Cham: Springer International Publishing.