1.22 leadership
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ASSIGNMENT1BRIEF1.pptxAssignment-1 Brief: Reflective Essay Writing
ENTE 3522: Perspectives in Creative Leadership
Assessment-1 Brief on Reflective Essay
Purpose of the session
What is reflection?
We reflect quite naturally in our day to day lives, thinking about things that have happened, why they happened, whether we handled them well.
Reflection is a purposeful activity in which you analyse experiences, or your own practice/skills/responses, in order to learn and improve.
WHICH MAY INVOLVE:
Reflecting on your own professional or academic practice
Scrutinising an experience and the way you dealt with it
Evaluating a project or experiment and considering how to do it better next time
Reflecting on things you have read and linking theory with practice/reality
Why is reflection important?
Why is reflection important in leadership studies?
Incorporation of teaching strategies associated with reflective writing within the HEI leadership classroom did enhance student learning, whereby allowing students to approach learning in a deep manner (Moore, Boyd, & Dooley, 2010).
Your own experience of a group work that you involved in previous years. The group work may refer to a collective work that you involved in. The context of a group work can be but not limited to:
Educational settings such as a group project that was undertaken within a module, or a program at the University, high school or trainings
An organized group work that you personally participated out of the University, e.g., a civic project, a business project, family project, charity work, community/religious work, or else.
Assessment 1: Reflective Essay (%50) This individual assignment will give you a chance to reflect upon certain aspects of leadership. You are expected to be creative in this assignment and generate/collate your own experiential data to reflect upon certain aspects of leadership discussed throughout lectures, seminars and suggested readings. The essay will be 2000 words . The experience that you will draw on can be EITHER:
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OR
Others’ leadership experiences that you were not part of. You can extract leadership experiences from various sources such as:
Having interviews with leaders,
Shadowing a leader or leaders
Reading novels/books (whatever kinds) on certain leader or aspect of leadership
Watching movies or documentaries on certain leader or aspect of leadership
Collecting pieces of magazines, news clips or columns on certain leader or aspect of leadership
You can also blend those sources listed above by citing your references clearly.
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Deadline & Return:
Release Date: Friday 06th October 2023
Submission Date/Time: Monday 5th of February 2024 (12.00-noon)
Guidelines
In structuring your writing you can draw on reflective writing models.
In the rest of the brief you will find tips how to structure your reflective essay. We have combined the two frameworks 1) Gibbs reflective cycle (1988) and 2)Ash, Clayton, & Moses (2009) Learning through Critical Reflection that are adopted to be used in an essay format.
The suggested structure would help you to structure your approach towards reflective writing & practice which is helpful to think of reflection in a cyclical as well as categorical manner.
Reflective writing model
DESCRIBE THE EXPERIENCE:
Description of the experience
Feelings and thoughts about the experience
EXAMINE THE EXPERIENCE:
Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
Analysis to make sense of the situation
ARTICULATE(REFLEXIVE) LEARNING
Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.
Can you identify: The description, evaluation, analysis and action plan
One of the most useful activities on the Business Communication module was the ‘difficult client’ role-play. In this activity, I had to deal with a complex complaint from a demanding client. On reflection, I felt I was able to communicate a positive attitude through my interaction as well as provide a range of solutions to the client’s satisfaction. However, feedback from my peers made me realise that my body language conveyed a negative message, mainly through lack of direct eye contact. Perroni et al. (2010) suggest that one of the main reasons for ineffective communication is negative body language. Other studies (Richardson, 2016 and Patel, 2013) have demonstrated the importance of direct eye contact to establish trust. As trust is essential for effective business relationships (Li and Hong, 2011), this suggests direct eye contact can improve the success of business communication. Overall, I felt my interaction with the client had a successful outcome, and demonstrated a good level of verbal communication skills. In the future, however, I will pay more attention to my body language, to ensure this does not undermine my verbal message (DMU Reflective writing guideline, Online)
Outline
Title:
Find a brief and catchy title that will reflect the main message and/or context of your reflective essay
Introduction:
Start with briefly introducing what we will be reading in this essay by addressing questions like:
What is the purpose of the study? Please clearly state your theoretical motivation in addition to the practical/managerial or personal relevance.
Context/background and Method: Tell your story on leadership practices in the particular experiental data setting you have based your study on. In reading those, the reader needs to be able to visualize what kind of setting or context the story is being told. Here, think and write like a theatre designer who creates the setting for the production, allowing the audience to believe they are in a different place or time!
As in all story-telling, let us know about the main characters, scene and time(s) of the event and any other specific aspects characterizing this context.
What method of data collection and analysis you used?
Stage 1: Description of the event
Describe in detail the event you are reflecting on. Include e.g. where were you; who else was there; why were you there; what were you doing; what were other people doing; what was the context of the event; what happened; what was your part in this; what parts did the other people play; what was the result.
Stage 2: Feelings
At this stage try to recall and explore the things that were going on inside your head i.e. why does this event stick in your mind. Include e.g. how you were feeling when the event started; what you were thinking about at the time; how did it make you feel; how did other people make you feel; how did you feel about the outcome of the event; what do you think about it now.
PHASE 1: DESCRIBE THE EXPERIENCE
Theoretical Framework and Analysis:
Introduce the reader a particular theoretical framework(s) that you will use in inquiring into your research problem. Focus is important in here. For that, instead of covering many different theoretical frameworks, you can try to pick one or max two theories and work through the concepts within this framework.
Let us know/justify why you picked up this theoretical framework and how you expect/think this theoretical approach and perspective(s) help(ed) you with addressing specific theoretical questions/issue(s) in your case.
Make the actual analysis. Examine your focused issue by using selected specific theoretical approach.
Stage 3: Evaluation
Try to evaluate or make a judgement about what has happened. Consider what was good about the experience and what was bad about the experience or didn’t go so well
Stage 4: Analysis
Break the event down into its component parts so they can be explored separately. You may need to ask more detailed questions about the answers to the last stage. Include e.g. what went well; what did you do well; what did others do well; what went wrong or did not turn out how it should have done; in what way did you or others contribute to this
PHASE 2: EXAMINE THE EXPERIENCE
Discussions and Conclusions:
Let us recall the purpose of this essay and what you have found after examining your experiental case(s).
Provide critical discussions.
Whether/how your theoretical framework(s) were helpful, please be very specific here how/in what ways this particular theory helped you or failed to help you. For instance, what questions you could ask/get a response or what issues you could or not address by the help of this theory.
Discuss if/whether this framework is applicable to similar cases, models, contexts or aspects of leadership like yours. Why or why not? Here you can get the help of discussions we held in the classroom or of reading additional articles on the strengths and criticisms towards particular approaches that you adopted.
Return to the overall theory or perspective and critically reflect upon its explanatory capacity by referring to your particular case and/or context. Make generalization(s) and abstractions here. Try to be bold (but also informed)! What future research can learn from your research is the main question you need to address here!
Stage 5: Conclusion
This differs from the evaluation stage in that now you have explored the issue from different angles and have a lot of information to base your judgement. It is here that you are likely to develop insight into you own and other people’s behaviour in terms of how they contributed to the outcome of the event. Remember the purpose of reflection is to learn from an experience. Without detailed analysis and honest exploration that occurs during all the previous stages, it is unlikely that all aspects of the event will be taken into account and therefore valuable opportunities for learning can be missed. During this stage you should ask yourself what you could have done differently.
Stage 6: Action Plan
During this stage you should think yourself forward into encountering the event again and to plan what you would do – would you act differently or would you be likely to do the same?
Here the cycle is tentatively completed and suggests that should the event occur again it will be the focus of another reflective cycle
PHASE 3: ARTICULATE (REFLEXIVE) LEARNING
The thickness/richness of your experiental data and description
Your skilful application of the experiental data to examine theoretical points/insights
That will lead to an articulate and reflexive argument(s) that will develop academic theory and practice of leadership
..……..will bring you a high mark………..
To do Good: Try to address each question/point at each section! IN overall;
References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLA60JC12TU&feature=youtu.be
REFLECTIVE WRITING
DMU Reflective Writing Guidelines Online available at: https://www2.library.dmu.ac.uk/DOLORES/87872/reflectivewriting/content/index.html#/lessons/h7fkR-lGhG1QsEJPoyZVcjG_SAvRhd6b
Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Learning through critical reflection: A tutorial for service-learning students. Ash, Clayton & Moses.
Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic.
