The answer here is critical thinking as it is central to reflective thinking. You must 'question' everything about your experiences, about what you are told and about what you read, critical thinking is an important element.

Academic writing certainly helps with the written part of reflection, but not necessarily the thought processes. While memory helps, it is not essential and spatial awareness does not come into it.

Each of the following are valid reasons to reflect:

• Engage in personal or self-development
• Build theory from observations
• Consider the process of our own learning

This means the answer to the question is focusing on everything that you do wrong. Reflection is not supposed to be a negative experience. You need to identify things that went well, just as much as things that did not work well.

Using reflective learning in practice to help with future experiences is the most important element of reflection. Without using reflection as a learning tool to help you in the future, your reflections are pointless. Make sure you use the most of any opportunity for reflection that you have. It is the best way to maximise your learning from any event or experience.

The answer to this is:

• An experience
• Thinking about the experience
• Learning from the experience

This highlights the three elements of reflection. The first involves actually having an experience. After all - you need this to have something to reflect on! Secondly, you need to think about that experience. How did it go? What went well? What did not? Finally, you need to learn something from those thoughts. How can this experience help you in the future?

Sorry to disappoint, but Bartram has not written a model of reflection. Kolb, Schön and Gibbs have. All these models were introduced earlier in this section.