BRINGING REFLECTIVE WRITING TO THE ENGINEERING CLASSROOM

Reflective writing in Engineering is still a relative novelty. Engineering education focuses on technologies and engineering methods, in short, how to do stuff. Students need guidance on evaluating "Is my approach a good approach?" The application and selection of engineering methods need to garner more attention. Through reflective writing assignments, we offer the students a chance to evaluate their choice of methods (both cognitively and intuitively), reflect on their feelings around success and failure, and explore strategies to deepen learning and sup- port well-being. Traditional scientific methods have taught practitioners to remove themselves from the experiment, but this is only part of the truth: the observer affects the result and is af- fected by the result. Students reported discomfort when asked how they felt in these situations: no one had offered this kind of exploration to them previously. Our brief experiment with intro- ducing reflective writing to the academic classroom suggests benefits such as deeper-reaching learning, growing self-awareness, and the ability to identify potential pitfalls before they evolve into crises.