Reflective essay examples: six annotated samples and how to write one

The man set a cordless drill on the counter as if it had insulted him. “It doesn’t work,” he said. I tested it. It worked. He watched me pull the trigger twice and said again, “It doesn’t work,” and I remember thinking, with the confidence of a seventeen-year-old who had held the job for nine days, that he was either lying or confused.

That summer I worked the returns desk at a hardware store two exits from my house. The job came with a scanner, a binder of policies and one rule from my manager, Denise: refund what the policy allows, refuse what it doesn’t, and don’t argue. For the first weeks I treated every return as a test of that rule. A drill that worked was a drill that didn’t qualify. I said no politely and felt efficient.

The change came from a woman returning forty dollars of floor tile. She had the receipt, so there was nothing to decide, but while I counted the boxes she told me the tile was for her mother’s bathroom, and her mother had moved into assisted living the week before. She wasn’t returning tile. She was returning a plan. After that I heard it everywhere: paint that was the wrong blue for a nursery, a hose for a garden that never got dug, a drill bought for a shelf someone had meant to build. The objects were fine. The plans had failed, and my counter was where people came to say so out loud. I think now that the man with the drill was one of them. “It doesn’t work” was the only sentence he had for a project that had gone wrong, and I had answered the sentence instead of the person.

I don’t want to make the returns desk into more than it was. Most returns were wrong sizes and duplicate purchases, and the policy still decided them. But I stopped treating “it doesn’t work” as a claim to disprove and started asking what the thing was for. Sometimes the answer changed nothing. Sometimes it turned a refusal into an exchange for the right part, which was what the customer had wanted all along. In August Denise asked why my exchanges had gone up and my complaints had gone down. I said I was asking more questions, which was true but not the whole answer.

The whole answer is that I had confused being right with being useful. I was right about the drill. Being right let me end the conversation, and ending it was what I wanted, because I was seventeen and the line was long. I still catch myself doing it with my roommate, with group project partners, even with my own drafts: answering the sentence instead of the person. The returns desk didn’t cure that. It gave me a question to ask first. What was this for?

Description. In the second week of my surgical placement, I gave the verbal handover at the end of a late shift. I was running late, read through observations quickly and did not mention that Mrs. A had refused her evening meal and seemed more confused than in the morning. The night nurse found out when Mrs. A tried to get out of bed alone at 2 a.m.

Feelings. At the time I felt relieved to be done. When my mentor raised it the next day, I felt embarrassed, then defensive: I had recorded the change in the notes, so I told myself I hadn’t really left it out.

Evaluation. My written notes were accurate and timed. My verbal handover, which is what the night staff act on in their first hour, did not match them. The information existed but did not travel.

Analysis. I rushed because I treated handover as the end of my shift rather than the start of someone else’s. I also went through each patient in the same order, routine observations first, so a change from baseline was buried among normal readings. And I was reluctant to sound alarmed about a change I wasn’t sure of, so I let the notes say it for me. Structured handover tools such as SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) exist partly for this reason: they put what has changed first.

Conclusion. Accurate notes do not replace saying the important thing out loud. In my handover, the most important item came last or not at all.

Action plan. For the rest of this placement I will write three lines per patient before handover, starting with any change since the morning, and ask my mentor to listen to one handover a week and tell me what she would have wanted to hear first.

What? I volunteer two afternoons a week at a library homework club for children aged eight to eleven. On Tuesday a fourth grader, Leo, refused to start a page of subtraction word problems. I explained borrowing three times. He put his head on the table, and I left feeling I had failed him.

So what? I explained the method three times and never asked what he already knew. When the coordinator sat with him later, she asked him to do the first problem out loud, and he could borrow fine. He was stuck on reading the word problems. I had been solving the problem I was comfortable with, the math, instead of the one in front of me. It also explains my frustration: repeating an explanation feels like effort, so I assumed it was the right kind of effort.

Now what? Before I explain anything, I will ask the student to try the first item out loud and show me where it gets hard. When a worksheet’s reading level seems to be the obstacle, I will tell the coordinator, who can find another.

Reporting. In my third week of student teaching I ran a gallery walk for a ninth-grade lesson on persuasive techniques: six ads around the room, groups rotating every five minutes to label them. By the third rotation most groups were talking about the weekend.

Responding. I raised my voice to restart the rotations, which worked for about a minute. Afterward I was frustrated with the class, then with myself for being frustrated with fourteen-year-olds for acting fourteen.

Relating. This was the second group activity of mine that had drifted, and both times every station asked the same question. In my own high school classes, stations only held my attention when each one asked something new.

Reasoning. With the same task at every station, groups had nothing new to do after the second rotation. My cooperating teacher pointed out that there was no product to hand in, so no reason to finish. I had assumed interest would carry the activity. The structure needed to.

Reconstructing. Next time each station will ask a different question, groups will add to a shared sheet so the last group reads everyone’s answers, and the lesson will end with a two-minute exit ticket. I will try the revised version with my second-period class next week and compare.

In September I thought revision meant fixing commas. My first draft of the argument essay on school start times came back with a comment I didn’t understand: “Your best point is on page four.” I moved one sentence and resubmitted. It wasn’t until the October peer workshop, when Priya summarized my essay back to me and got it wrong, that I saw the problem. She hadn’t been careless. My argument really was buried under three paragraphs of background.

Comparing my first and final drafts now, the biggest change is not any sentence but the order. The final draft opens with the claim that used to sit on page four and cuts the background to one paragraph. I don’t think I am a good reviser yet. I still resist cutting what I worked hard on, and my second essay shows it. But I no longer think of revision as cleanup. It is where I find out what I meant.

I expected a monster story, because that is what Frankenstein is in every Halloween aisle. What I found was a book about a parent who runs away. Victor works “for nearly two years” to bring the creature to life, then rushes out of the room almost as soon as it opens its eyes. When the creature tells his own story in the middle of the novel, describing how he learned to speak by watching a family through a gap in a cottage wall, I found myself on his side, and that unsettled me. I had arrived ready to judge him by how he looked, which is exactly what every character in the book does. I notice now how quickly I use the word “monster” for people whose story I haven’t heard. The novel doesn’t let Victor off the hook, and it didn’t let me off either.

Descriptive: Our group presentation was on Thursday. Marcus didn’t come, so I had to present his slides. I didn’t know the material and we got a C. It was very stressful, and I learned the importance of teamwork.
All story, then a lesson in a stock phrase.

Shallow: When Marcus didn’t show up, I was angry, because I had done my part and now my grade depended on him. I learned that you can’t always rely on other people, so next time I will do more of the work myself.
Names a feeling and a lesson, but the lesson is the first thought anyone would have, and it never questions the writer’s own role.

Reflective: When Marcus didn’t show up, my first thought was that he had let us down. It took me a week to admit we had let him down first. We split the slides by topic, and he got the statistics section because nobody else wanted it. No one asked whether he understood it. He told me later he had been stuck for days and too embarrassed to say so. The group didn’t fail because one person disappeared. It failed because we divided the work without checking that everyone could do their share, and I was the one who proposed dividing it. Next time I would keep the split but add a check-in halfway, where each of us explains our part to the others.
Revises the first reading, finds a cause, accepts some of the blame and ends with a specific change.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.