Reflective Essay

Examples of students’ reflective writing

Student A

The presentation that I gave as a result of our group task had some aspects which could have gone better. This report describes our experience.

Firstly our group dynamics were problematic, there were two people who just didn’t participate at all and no-one wanted to lead the group. One person started to lead the group then he got ill so it didn’t really work.

Secondly none of us really did as much reading and preparation as we should have. This was obvious in the lack of content in the final presentation. I actually did do some reading but we didn’t get together to talk about how it should fit together.

Finally we didn’t rehearse the presentation so it was stilted, people didn’t know what they were supposed to say, we ran out of time at the end and it didn’t seem very professional. Our slides were okay but we only used about 60% of them.

Student B

The presentation that I gave as a result of our group task had some aspects which could have gone better. This report will briefly describe the presentation, identifying some of the problems our group faced. The purpose of this is to learn from our experience so that future presentations will be better.

The presentation was not very good, firstly our group dynamics were problematic, there were two people who just didn’t participate at all and no-one wanted to lead the group. I am disappointed about this because I have been in groups before where a similar thing has happened so we could have predicted this. Thinking about this again has made me realise that the other members of the group were probably expecting me to lead it. I probably should have taken more responsibility for the leadership. Also I have since read Cottrell’s chapter on group roles which was really useful and it has made me realise the next group I am in I will discuss group roles from the start.

Secondly none of us really did as much reading and preparation as we should have. This was evident...