Written by Chris Drew (PhD)
Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]
| February 17, 2023Here are the exact steps you need to follow for a reflection on group work essay.
Do you have to reflect on how your group work project went?
This is a super common essay that teachers assign. So, let’s have a look at how you can go about writing a superb reflection on your group work project that should get great grades.
The essay structure I outline below takes the funnel approach to essay writing: it starts broad and general, then zooms in on your specific group’s situation.
Disclaimer: Make sure you check with your teacher to see if this is a good style to use for your essay. Take a draft to your teacher to get their feedback on whether it’s what they’re looking for!
This is a 6-step essay (the 7 th step is editing!). Here’s a general rule for how much depth to go into depending on your word count:
Adjust this essay plan depending on your teacher’s requirements and remember to always ask your teacher, a classmate or a professional tutor to review the piece before submitting.
Here’s the steps I’ll outline for you in this advice article:
You might have heard that you need to define your terms in essays. Well, the most important term in this essay is ‘reflection’.
So, let’s have a look at what reflection is…
Reflection is the process of:
Reflection is encouraged in most professions because it’s believed that reflection helps you to become better at your job – we could say ‘reflection makes you a better practitioner’.
Think about it: let’s say you did a speech in front of a crowd. Then, you looked at video footage of that speech and realised you said ‘um’ and ‘ah’ too many times. Next time, you’re going to focus on not saying ‘um’ so that you’ll do a better job next time, right?
Well, that’s reflection: thinking about what happened and how you can do better next time.
It’s really important that you do both of the above two points in your essay. You can’t just say what happened. You need to say how you will do better next time in order to get a top grade on this group work reflection essay.
Okay, so you have a good general idea of what reflection is. Now, what scholarly sources should you use when explaining reflection? Below, I’m going to give you two basic sources that would usually be enough for an undergraduate essay. I’ll also suggest two more sources for further reading if you really want to shine!
I recommend these two sources to cite when explaining what reflective practice is and how it occurs. They are two of the central sources on reflective practice:
Bassot, B. (2015). The reflective practice guide: An interdisciplinary approach to critical reflection. Routledge.
Brock, A. (2014). What is reflection and reflective practice?. In The Early Years Reflective Practice Handbook (pp. 25-39). Routledge.
Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.
Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001). Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Now, if you want to go deeper and really show off your knowledge, have a look at these two scholars:
Enjoy subscriber-only access to this article’s pdf
Once you have given an explanation of what group work is (and hopefully cited Gibbs, Rolfe, Dewey or Schon), I recommend digging into the benefits of group work for your own learning.
The teacher gave you a group work task for a reason: what is that reason?
You’ll need to explain the reasons group work is beneficial for you. This will show your teacher that you understand what group work is supposed to achieve. Here’s some ideas:
You might be able to add more ideas to this list, or you might just want to select one or two from that list to write about depending on the length requirements for the essay.
Make sure you provide citations for these points above. You might want to use google scholar or google books and type in ‘Benefits of group work’ to find some quality scholarly sources to cite.
Step 3 is the mirror image of Step 2. For this step, explore the challenges posed by group work.
Students are usually pretty good at this step because you can usually think of some aspects of group work that made you anxious or frustrated. Here are a few common challenges that group work causes:
As with Step 3, consider adding more points to this list if you need to, or selecting one or two if your essay is only a short one.
| Pros of Group Work | Cons of Group Work |
|---|---|
| 1. Multiple Perspectives. Members of your team will have different perspectives to bring to the table. Embrace team brainstorming to bring in more ideas than you would on your own. | 1. Time-Consuming. You can get on with an individual task at your own pace, but groups need to arrange meet-ups and set deadlines to function effectively. This is time-consuming and requires pre-planning. |
| 2. Contribution of Unique Skills. Each of your team members will have different skills. Embrace your IT-obsessed team member’s computer skills; embrace the organizer’s skills for keeping the group on track, and embrace the strongest writer’s editing skills to get the best out of your group. | 2. Learning Style Conflicts. Some of your team members will want to get everything done at once; others will procrastinate frequently. You might also have conflicts in strategic directions depending on your different approaches to learning. |
| 3. Improved Communication Skills. Use group work to learn how to communicate more effectively. Focus on active listening and asking questions that will prompt your team members to expand on their ideas. | 3. Free Loaders. Many groups struggle with people who don’t carry their own weight. You need to ensure you delegate tasks to the lazy group members and be stern with them about sticking to the deadlines they agreed upon. |
| 4. Learn to Manage Workplace Conflict. In the workforce you’re not going to get along with your colleagues. Use group work at university to learn how to deal with difficult team members calmly and professionally. | 4. Communication Breakdown. It can be hard to get group members all on the same page. Members don’t rely to questions, get anxiety and shut down, or get busy with their own lives. It’s important every team member is ready and available for ongoing communication with the group. |
You’ll probably find you can cite the same scholarly sources for both steps 2 and 3 because if a source discusses the benefits of group work it’ll probably also discuss the challenges.
Step 4 is where you zoom in on your group’s specific challenges. Have a think: what were the issues you really struggled with as a group?
Feel free to also mention some things your group did really well. Have a think about these examples:
Here, because you’re talking about your own perspectives, it’s usually okay to use first person language (but check with your teacher). You are also talking about your own point of view so citations might not be quite as necessary, but it’s still a good idea to add in one or two citations – perhaps to the sources you cited in Steps 2 and 3?
Step 5 is where you can explore how you worked to overcome some of the challenges you mentioned in Step 4.
So, have a think:
In this step, you should be showing how your team was proactive in reflecting on your group work progress and making changes throughout the process to ensure it ran as smoothly as possible. This act of making little changes throughout the group work process is what’s called ‘Reflection in Action’ (Schön, 2017).
Schön, D. A. (2017). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Routledge.
Step 6 is the most important step, and the one far too many students skip. For Step 6, you need to show how you not only reflected on what happened but also are able to use that reflection for personal growth into the future.
This is the heart and soul of your piece: here, you’re tying everything together and showing why reflection is so important!
This is the ‘action plan’ step in Gibbs’ cycle (you might want to cite Gibbs in this section!).
For Step 6, make some suggestions about how (based on your reflection) you now have some takeaway tips that you’ll bring forward to improve your group work skills next time. Here’s some ideas:
This step will be personalized based upon your own group work challenges and how you felt about the group work process. Even if you think your group worked really well together, I recommend you still come up with one or two ideas for continual improvement. Your teacher will want to see that you used reflection to strive for continual self-improvement.
Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.
Okay, you’ve got the nuts and bolts of the assessment put together now! Next, all you’ve got to do is write up the introduction and conclusion then edit the piece to make sure you keep growing your grades.
Here’s a few important suggestions for this last point:
That’s it! 7 steps to writing a quality group work reflection essay. I hope you found it useful. If you liked this post and want more clear and specific advice on writing great essays, I recommend signing up to my personal tutor mailing list.
Let’s sum up with those 7 steps one last time:
