Writing Reflexively and Reflectively
Reflexive vs reflective writing
| Reflexive writing | Reflective writing |
|---|---|
| First person (“I”, “my”) | Third person; impersonal where possible |
| Personal response | Academic analysis |
| Subjective | Aims at objectivity |
| Captures immediate, surface feelings | Goes deeper through theory |
| Cataloguing of experience | Considered exploration |
| Foundations for the professional response | The professional response itself |
Both are still academic
Reflexive writing is not:
- A diary entry
- A blog
- An email to a friend
Reflective writing should still have:
- A clear introduction
- A main body
- A conclusion
- Evidence and references where relevant
- Clear links to theory
- Evidence of what has been learned
- Other perspectives considered
The value of using both
Reflexive writing is personal and subjective. Reflective writing is impersonal and objective. The two together make a powerful combination that runs from immediate experience to theoretical analysis and back.
Johns’s model produces two kinds of writing, and they look very different. Reflexive writing is personal, first-person, and immediate. Reflective writing is academic, more impersonal, and theoretical. Both serve the practitioner, and the model expects them to work together.
What reflexive writing is
Reflexive writing is different from other forms of academic writing in one obvious way: it switches from the third person to the first person.
Most academic writing avoids “I” and “my” in favour of impersonal constructions. Reflexive writing reverses that. The practitioner develops a style that uses “I” and personal experience explicitly.
The danger most often named with reflexive writing is being too personal. Some critics argue that reflexive writing slides into self-indulgence or therapeutic processing rather than producing useful learning. The risk is real but manageable.
Reflexive writing is, in fact, a personal response to events and experiences. It is meant to capture immediate and surface considerations. It aims at cataloguing the practitioner’s response, and yes, this catalogue is subjective. That subjectivity is part of the data, not a flaw.
Reflexive writing provides the foundations for the professional response that comes later in reflective writing. Without the reflexive layer, the reflective layer is built on guesses about what the practitioner felt and thought. With it, the foundation is in place.
What reflexive writing feels like to do
Reflexive writing might feel strange at first. Most teachers have been trained to keep “I” out of academic writing. Switching to “I” and writing about personal feelings and actions can feel unprofessional, at least initially.
The feeling tends to fade with practice. After a few weeks of reflexive writing, the personal voice becomes natural. The teacher learns that personal writing about professional experience is a different mode from journal writing about personal life. The mode has its own conventions.
Reflexive writing takes practice. A new reflexive writer should expect their first attempts to feel awkward and produce thin material. With time, the writing gets sharper and reaches deeper layers.
The practitioner can experiment with different models of reflection. Different cue questions produce different reflexive material. A teacher who finds Johns’s cues do not bring up the right material for them might try Gibbs’s or Boud’s questions and see what those produce.
Reflexive writing is still academic
Even though reflexive writing uses the first person, it is still academic writing. The form has limits.
It is not a diary entry. It is not a blog. It is not an email to a friend.
The reflexive entry has a purpose: to surface the practitioner’s response to a specific experience for later analysis. A diary entry can drift wherever the writer’s attention goes. A reflexive entry stays focused on the experience.
A reflexive entry should also not be just a description of events. The description goes in stage 1 of Johns’s model. The reflexivity comes in the inner work: feelings, thoughts, expectations, assumptions. Reflection lives in the analysis of events, not in their re-telling.
Reflexive writing should not be chatty in style. The first person is allowed, but the register stays professional. “I noticed that I was feeling defensive” is reflexive academic writing. “I was so annoyed at this point you would not believe it” is informal writing in the wrong register.
Reflexive writing is the considered exploration of the practitioner’s own role in the experience. The word considered is doing work. The reflexivity is purposeful, not stream-of-consciousness.
What reflective writing is
Reflective writing is the second mode. In contrast to reflexive writing, reflective writing can feel quite strange because it is much more academic.
Reflexive writing is personal and easy to fall into once the practitioner is comfortable with first person. Reflective writing is the move back toward academic distance. The teacher writes about their feelings and actions from an impersonal perspective. The aim is to introduce a level of objectivity to the reflection that counterpoints the subjectivity of the reflexive layer.
What this means in practice is that reflective writing looks at the experience through different models, theories, and understandings about teaching and learning. The teacher tries to see aspects of their experience from a more impersonal, more theoretical point of view.
The writing is academic. It is not a journal entry, a diary, a blog, or an email. It is structured, analytical, and theoretical.
What reflective writing requires
Reflective writing should still contain a clear introduction, a main body, and a conclusion.
It should have structured paragraphs that lead the reader through a process from beginning to end, from introduction through analysis to conclusion.
It may include evidence and references, drawing on the literature where relevant.
Most importantly, in contrast to reflexive writing, reflective writing should link experience to theory. The connection is the point.
The writing should show what the practitioner has learned from the process of reflection itself, as much as what they have learned from the experience that happened in the classroom.
It should also consider other perspectives. The student’s perspective, the colleague’s, the literature’s. A reflective piece that considers only the practitioner’s view has not done the impersonal work the genre requires.
How the two modes work together
Reflexive writing and reflective writing together provide a powerful framework that the individual teacher can engage with within Johns’s staged model.
The reflexive piece comes first. The teacher captures their personal response, in the first person, with subjectivity treated as part of the data. The reflexive piece names the feelings, the immediate thoughts, the surface reactions.
The reflective piece comes after. The teacher steps back and reads the experience through theory, frames it analytically, considers other perspectives, and produces something more impersonal and structured. The reflective piece links experience to theory and shows learning.
The combination matters. Reflexive writing alone produces personal insight that may or may not connect to professional knowledge. Reflective writing alone produces analytical material that may not be grounded in the practitioner’s actual experience. Together, the two provide the bridge from experience to professional understanding.
Reflexive writing is personal, first-person, subjective; reflective writing is academic, impersonal, theoretical
Reflexive writing captures the immediate personal response and provides the foundation. Reflective writing analyses the same experience through theory and other perspectives, producing the professional response. Both are academic in register, just in different modes. The combination links experience to theory and back.
A worked example
A teacher had a difficult parent meeting. Two pieces of writing might come out of it.
The reflexive piece, in the first person, names the experience as the teacher felt it. “I went into the meeting expecting tension and was already on edge when the parent began. I felt my jaw tighten when the criticism came. I noticed myself starting to defend before the parent had finished speaking. I felt embarrassed afterwards about how I had handled the opening.”
The reflective piece, more impersonal, analyses the same meeting through theory. It might draw on conflict resolution literature, on Boud’s work on emotional barriers to reflection, or on cultural frameworks for parent-teacher communication in Pakistani contexts. It would consider the parent’s perspective and possibly the student’s. It would name the learning: that early acknowledgment of the parent’s concern, before defending any decision, is a pattern worth practising. It would link this learning to specific reading or training the teacher could pursue.
The two pieces together produce something neither alone could. The reflexive piece holds the felt experience. The reflective piece places it in the wider professional context. The combination is what Johns’s model is designed to produce.
Why this distinction matters
Many teachers learning reflective practice produce one kind of writing or the other, not both. Some teachers write only reflexively, producing rich personal material that never connects to professional development. Other teachers write only reflectively, producing tidy analytical pieces that read as if a stranger wrote them about a generic situation.
Johns’s model insists on both. The teacher who learns to do both moves their reflective practice into a more developed phase. They have access to the personal data and to the analytical lens. They can work between the two as the situation requires.
The practice takes time to develop. Most teachers find one mode easier than the other. The discipline is to keep practising the harder one until both become available.