How To Write A Good Reflective Nursing Essay

Do you seek a course in nursing? Then you will probably have to write a nurse reflective essay. The job could be hard and demanding. But do not get scared! Before you write anything about a reflection essay, you should know what it means. Reflective writings are about your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences about many different things.

Table of Contents

Nursing students can improve their skills and learn more by writing reflective papers. Suppose you want to know how to write an essay about nursing. Then, this piece will tell you how to write a great student nurse reflection. It will give you examples of what to leave out or include and how to use reflection ideas.

What is an essay about nursing?

Ask yourself why it is important to write a thoughtful nursing essay. A nursing reflection essay is one of the most important ways to improve your professional knowledge and personal skills as a nurse because it has so many parts. Reflection is important in nursing because it gives you all the tools you need to grow as a person.

A review will help you think about your options and get a better idea of your strengths and weaknesses. Think of your nursing reflective essay as a chance to look at your skills, job, and personality to improve your nursing skills.

How to write a reflective paper on nursing

Not sure how to write a thoughtful essay on nursing? Now that you know what a nurse reflective essay is, you can start writing it. Here is a list of what to do and when.

First, make a plan.

Every reflective essay is a statement of how you feel about something, and the format helps you figure out how to say it. The first step to writing a good, interesting essay is to plan it out. What is a good outline framework for a reflection essay? Make a plan for everything you know. Describe what you would like to see in your introduction, body, and end.

Here’s an example of a plan for a reflection essay:

Introduction

Hook: Set the tone for your piece and start with a catchy sentence.

List the most important points.

Put all the important ideas and points into a single sentence.

Body
Part One:

Thesis statement: In one sentence, explain the first idea carefully.

Use sources that are reliable to back up your topic or idea. Use reasoning and common sense to figure out what the source is saying and what it means.

Part Two

Topic sentence: Carefully explain the second idea in a single line. Use links from reliable sources to support your topic or idea. Use logic and reason to figure out what the source is trying to say and what information it has.

Part Three

Explain the third idea carefully in a single line. Use reliable sources to back up your claim about the issue or idea. Use reasoning and scientific thinking to figure out what the source is saying and what information it has.

Conclusion

Change the wording of the thesis.

Review the main ideas.

And finally, add the last line.

Thesis statement for a reflective nursing essay

A subject sentence (also called a thesis statement) is a weak part of your paper because you have to explain your point of view in a few words. The goal is for people to read what you have written and understand it. Before you can write a good topic sentence for a reflection essay, you need to write down what you want to say.

To start, carefully think about the problem and decide how you feel about it. After making a plan, you should write your thesis statement. You do not need to tell the reader everything right away because you will talk more about this idea later.

After you have developed your thesis statement well, you can start writing. So, here are some examples of how to start a reflective essay, what to write in the body parts, and how to end it.

Introduction to a nursing essay that is reflective

Start your nursing reflection essay with a catchy first sentence to get people interested. You can start by explaining in detail your main reason for wanting to be a nurse. For example, in your opening, you could tell a story about a time when you were in the worst kind of trouble and how that fear made you want to become a nurse. In this first line, talk about how you got over your fears and are now ready to become a nurse. Make sure it is interesting and stays on topic.

Nursing Reflective Essay Body Paragraphs

In the body of a nurse reflective essay, there are arguments, explanations of the topic, and the main body of evidence. Every paragraph should start with a few short lines that explain what the paragraph is about, and the body should be broken up into many parts.

This will help your work flow better and make it easier for the reader to find what they are looking for. You should remember that argumentation is important. You should be able to count on a lot of things in your job. Learn more about each one in a separate line.

Pay attention to the order of meaning. In this situation, it would be wrong to say the same thing twice in different languages. It will make the person think that you have nothing to say. In your nurse reflective essay, you should remember to use transitions. Think about getting from one place to another quickly while taking your time.

The conclusion part of a reflective nursing essay

How do you end a thoughtful essay on nursing? Try to get your facts together in your last paragraph. Write down what you thought and what you learned. Try to include a few examples of how and why your actions and beliefs changed.

For example, you could talk about how helpful it was for you to be a volunteer nurse. You can also talk about how your ideals show up in your work and how they affect your job. You now know how to write a thoughtful essay about nursing. Your report will now be easier and faster to write.

Nursing reflective essay topics

During your nursing school, you will have to write a number of reflective essays and research papers. These kinds of homework are just as important as your hands-on studies. You might be given a topic to write about or be asked to choose your own. You should choose a topic that you know a lot about or are interested in learning more about. How would you choose a topic for a reflection essay on nursing? Read on to learn more before you look at a list of some nursing essay ideas to think about.

How to choose a topic for a reflection essay in nursing?

For a thoughtful nursing essay, you need to choose a topic with care. If you do not know what to write about, you could look through nursing guides for ideas. You can then read the necessary books and do research on the Internet.

Make a list of the most suggested and interesting topics and do some preliminary study to figure out how much information you can use for your other nursing essays.
Keep in mind the factors below too:

Define your goal audience. Most of the time, your teacher or speaker.
Bring out the best parts of your writing. It could be your best topic or something new that you need to find out more about.
Find out what you want to pay attention to. What do you need to say in your essay?
Show why it is important to pay attention to that particular topic.
Think about the best way to show the facts. This includes ways to look at certain events, analyze data, compare two things, etc.

If you are having trouble coming up with a good topic for your nursing reflection essay, you no longer need to worry. You will be able to find some things that will help you with, among other things, your reflection essay on nursing school. One example of a nursing reflection essay is the one below, which talks about empathy and support in nursing, among other things.

Empathy and support in nursing

Under this title, there are the following subtopics:

One of the most important things a nurse has to do is talk to patients.
Nursing is the process of taking care of sick people.
The idea is to not hurt anyone and then help them.
Nursing time management.
The best interests of the patient come first.
What made me want to become a nurse?
Doctors and patients do not talk about nursing care
How important it is for a nurse to improve her soft skills
Nurses should not only know about a small number of things.
An story about a work experience
Nursing’s morals and way of life
Nursing ethics and how they fit into my everyday life.
Essay on clinical thought in nursing.
Concerns about care for the elderly.

Reflective essay on leadership in nursing

This article is mostly about the leadership skills that nurses need. Reflection is an important tool for leadership in nursing. You can get over both physical and mental exhaustion by meditating. As a nurse leader or someone who wants to be a nurse leader, you can use a reflective essay on leadership in nursing to look at your core values and learn more about them.

Reflective essay on mentoring nursing students

The reflective essay on mentoring nursing students goes into depth about things that affect students in a nursing college or university. Nursing students face many problems and may need help from an experienced nurse. Aside from facing problems, they also need mentors to look up to as they move through their jobs. This is where a reflective essay on guidance in nursing comes in.

What nursing means to me: a personal reflection

A reflective writing on “what nursing means to me” lets you say what you would do if you were already a nurse. It shows how much you want to be a nurse and how much you care about it. It does the same thing that a personal reflecting essay on nursing school almost does.

Nursing informatics reflective essay in nursing

A nursing informatics reflective essay helps you put your knowledge, skills, and data integration into writing so that clinicians and patients can make better choices. Structures, communication, technology, and process are used to make choices that affect many places and roles. Our changing health care system needs technology to help with nursing work and education.

Nursing reflective tools and models

Scientists made many models from different fields to make it easy to reflect. You can use the models of thought below in your reflective nursing essay writing. You can improve your writing with the help of the models and tools.

There are many more problems than just the ones listed above. You can use each of the topics listed to find a nursing reflective essay sample on that subject. A nurse self-reflection essay is another example, but there are many more. You can look online for more ideas and examples if you want to.

Nursing reflective model of Gibbs

In 1998, Graham Gibbs told the whole world about his reflexive theory. Gibbs’s framework is a loop, which is great for understanding things that happen more than once. It consists of six parts:

Description

What happened?

Do not judge or come to a conclusion. Just describe.

Feelings

What did they think and how did they feel?

Again, do not try to figure out what they mean just yet.

Evaluation

What did you like and what did not you like about it?

Make choices based on facts.

Analysis

How important did you think other people’s situations were?

Conclusions
What are some big ideas you can draw from this experience and your evaluation?
What can you learn about yourself, your unique living situation, or the way you work?
Plans of action for each person.
What will you do with the information you have learned?
What are you going to do differently the next time this happens to you?

Dewey’s Model of Reflective Thinking

John Dewey said that reflective thinking is the conscious, continuous, and deliberate study of a thought or form of information, its foundations, and the different conclusions that knowledge leads to. John Dewey’s model of reflection was one of the first, and many others were based on it. He laid out five steps for thinking back:

Step 1: Figure out the problem.

Step 2: Find out what is going on.

Step 3: Think of a few different things you could do.

Step 4: Think about your choices and pick the best one from a group.

Step 5: Check out the answer.

Reflective Model of Kolb

Kolb’s reflective model, sometimes called the “Kolb Cycle,” is about turning facts into knowledge. The Kolb method has four main steps:

Real-world experience

Anyone who wants to learn should already know something about the area or field.

Taking notice and thinking about it

This step involves looking at what the person knows and has done in the past.

Creating abstract ideas

At this point, you make a model that sums up what you know and what you are good at. Ideas are made, links are made, and new information about how everything works and is put together is added.

Experimentation in new environments.

The last step is trying out the model and making sure it works and makes sense. This stage gives you a straight and unique experience. After that, the circle is closed.

Reflective Model chon

The book “The Reflexive Practitioner” explained Donald Schon’s reflexive model. He talked about how workers solve problems by improvising and getting better at it over time. Schon’s model of thought, like his books, is based on Dewey and allows people to learn about many things.

Action-reflection is when you think about something you did or experienced in the past. It means thinking about what could have gone better and what went well in the conversation. Critical thought means thinking and meditating on what you are doing as you go along and talking about things like best practices.

Bonds Model of reflection

David Bonds and Schon worked together to look into the limits of thoughtful practice in nursing. This idea is based on the idea that people learn best by doing.

By looking at his own experiences, the practitioner learns how to improve in certain areas.

Bonds says that when a person reflects, they may be learning without even realizing it. When he looks back on his life, he groups and sorts his feelings, thoughts, and results. He also compares his old goals with how well they turned out. Events, feelings, and ideas from the past make it important to keep looking at how people feel. This leads to new ideas, action groups, and good changes in behavior.

Reflective Model by Driscoll

John Driskoll came up with an easy way to think about reflection around the turn of the century. It requires long answers to questions that we already know the answers to. The scholar linked the three basic questions to the stages of the active experiment, then added trigger questions to finish the reflection process.

What’s the first step?

Comes out to talk about what happened as objectively as possible, without criticizing anything that happened.

Questions:

What really happened?

What did you do?

Did anyone else show up?

Did you like what happened to you? or did something bad happen? Or maybe both? If yes, why?

Step 2: Now what?

It needs you to slow down and start looking for patterns or important times.

The goal is to bring up ideas that help explain what is going on.

Questions:

What did you think and feel at the time?

How did you feel about it?

Why did you act like you did?

Did you feel the same way about the situation then as you do now?

Have your ideals ever been at odds with each other?

Do you think that your past experiences affected how you acted in this situation?

Was the problem a problem for anyone else?

What did they think and feel?

What did they say back? What caused them to act that way?

Step 3: What’s next?

Encourages students to start using what they have learned in new places and situations.

Questions

What did you gain from experience?

Could the bad things that happened have been avoided?

And what steps did you take?

What would you do differently the next time you were in the same situation?

What could you have done to start getting ready?

What went wrong the last time, and what could you focus on this time?

5Rs Framework of nursing reflective essay

This framework is made up of five key steps, and each one deals with a different part of thinking about yourself. People who think through the five steps will use all of the most important parts of reflection, which will help them to write a critical evaluation based on their experiences.

Report.

What sounds and sights do you have?

Write down everything.

React.

What else do you think is going on?

How do you know what works and what doesn’t?

What do you think about the thing you are thinking about?

What is it about this situation that makes you feel this way?

Relate.

How do your personal and work experiences and thoughts about this situation fit together?

What do they have to do with the things you know and can do?

How do you see this? Through what “lens” do you look at it?

From the point of view of class control or cooperative learning?

Do you need understanding of the subject matter or professional development?

Reason.

Do you think about how your point of view is different from that of someone else and how that affects the situation? Do you employ diverse ways, or does effective practice support your strategies? How does your point of view change how you see the issue?

Could seeing things from a different angle help?

Reconstruct.

What did you learn from this, and how do you think it will change the way you work?

CARL framework in reflective nursing

The CARL paradigm for assessment in nursing has four steps: context, action, results, and learning. The size of this model gives a lot of information, and even in the early stages, you can get a lot of useful information. This is also its main drawback, because it makes the model more complicated.

There are four steps to the framework:

Contextual: This part talks about the setting of the experience.
Action: A summary of what happened.
Outcomes: A description of what the work brought about.
Learning: Making a list of the new skills and experiences

Errors to avoid when writing a reflective nursing essay

In a nursing school, there may be a lot of competition. Even if you have great grades and a high GPA, it is hard to get into nursing school. Because of this, your essay needs to be the best it can be! One of the best ways to make sure your writing is perfect is to learn the most common mistakes and avoid them. On the list are some common nurse reflective essay errors. Check them out here:

Do not talk about your own experience as a nurse.
Without a story from real life, a nurse reflection essay seems very weak.
It is not enough to just list the things a nurse should be like as a person. Tell the hiring committee a story that shows how helpful you are when it comes to taking care of other people.

How can I improve my skills in writing a nursing reflective essay?

Traditional writings are not the same as reflective tasks. When writing a reflection essay on nursing, there are some important things you should keep in mind. You can use different ways to reflect on a task. You should also follow any other rules that your course or lesson gives you. To write a good essay, you should first think about what it means to write reflectively.

Have a proper understanding of reflective writing

So, what is thoughtful writing exactly? This question makes you think in new ways and keeps you on your toes. A reflective essay looks at what happened in a medical area and explains what happened and why. It often includes frameworks or theories to help the student do better in future studies.

Use an academic language

Academic language includes strengths, shortcomings, worries, and blunders; you can talk about observations, sentiments, and sensations using personal language like “I” and “us.”This is appropriately critiquing yourself, an event or others necessitates evidence to back up your claims, just like things spoken or done, their sources, and effects – thus, you will need detailed recordings of the incidents and your views.

Think reflectively

When you think about things, you:

Taking into account what was done.
Analyzing the situation by looking at it from many different points of view.
Use theme ideas, models of reflection, and your own experiences.

You should look closely at how you and others act to prepare for the future. Think about what happened, what went well and what didn’t, as well as what you think. Think about what you might do differently in the future and explain why.

Use the correct structure for composing a reflective essay writing

Your tasks for reflecting should be in order. Writing that is not for school, like a personal journal, a learning diary, or a narrative for conceptual design, is often not structured. But there are a lot of different ways to put together your thoughtful thoughts for an academic reflection. Look at the example below.

Here are some of the most important parts of reflection:

First, talk about the event, problem, or subject.

The account of what happened and what the problem is

Do not go into too much detail, but say what caused and led to the important event.

Explain what happened and what you think about it. Talk about what you are trying to solve, what you have learned, and how you would move forward.

Description

Most of the time, short accounts make it clear what happened and what is being looked into.

For example, each person of my team had certain tasks to do.

But not everyone on the team thought the tasks were hard in the same way.

Interpretation

You can talk about what is most important, interesting, useful, or significant about the thing, event, or idea. You can use ways to explain things, like theory.

Outcome

In your last sentence. talk about what you have learned from the experience and what it means for you in the future.

Words that make you think

It would be very important to use words that make you think. Some words and sentences that will help you improve your reflective writing are:

Description

You may need to talk about events, ideas, or things in your thoughtful writing. This area does not have any unique words because there are many ways to describe the things in it. Use the present tense to describe your idea, theory, or model.

Interpretation

You could start your essay with “For me,” “I found,” “I felt,” or “I think…” You should also explain or show why you think what you think.

You can also look online for the best-rated nursing reflective essay samples to learn more about how to write one. This will point you in the right direction. You can also choose to buy an online sample of a nursing reflective essay. To learn how to write a good thoughtful nursing essay, you have to put in a lot of work.

Frequently asked questions about a nursing reflective essay

Why would you write a reflective essay in nursing?

A nursing reflective essay tries to explain how someone feels about something that happened in the past, including how their behavior changed and what they learned from it. It is often written about in a journal post, which shows how the writer’s views have changed over time.

What are the qualities of a good nurse reflective essay?

There are both real and imagined parts in a nurse reflective essay. We combine academic study with what we know from our own lives. This type of paper should show the reader how our personal events and the lessons we have learned from them shape how we act.

What are the three fundamental elements of a nursing reflection paper?

There should be three clear parts to a nurse reflective essay. It should have a clear introduction that explains the problem, a body that looks at the causes, and an end that talks about possible solutions and how the problem affected the author.

What is the best nursing reflective model?

For nurses, the Gibbs approach is a great choice. The plan is easy to figure out. So, it is easy to use in any situation.

Its time to get started on your nursing reflective essay

Anyone who wants to be a nurse needs to know these tips. When you write a nursing reflection essay, you show off your nursing skills. Now that you have the tips, why not give it a try?