Forms of reflection – for all assessment tasks

When you are working on your Director’s Notebook, Collaborative Project, Solo Theatre Piece or Research Presentation, you are going though a process of creation, research and development, shaping your work for a particular audience. Whether you are trying to get a vision across or trying to achieve an intended impact on an audience, you will need to reflect on what you have achieved, or not, and how you will develop the work and build on ideas.

This blog will address some ways you can reflect on your own work, or how you can use the same ideas to help your mentor reflect on your work. Some of the ideas you may also want to use with your audiences, to help them reflect on what you have shown, to gauge how close you are to achieving your intentions and impact.

Different forms of reflection

Retrospective Reflection– Think back to some key things that have inspired you in the past. Why do you think it was so significant for you and how will you choose your text for the DN to reflect something that interests you?

Intentional Reflection– List two or three things you discovered during the improvisation that you could include in the final piece or build on for a character or scene. List two or three areas that you want to research or examine further.

Evaluative Reflection– What worked well? What was challenging? How did you solve the problem? What did this teach you? What did you contribute and why?

Action Points– List things to remember for the future or things to do next. You can treat this as artistic advice to your future self from your present self.

Anecdotal – Write your ideas or experience up as a story. What would the 3 key lines be? Write this in 3^rd person. You can write this from the perspective of a director, creator, spectator or performer.

Pictorial – Draw patterns, shapes and images that show key moments of the work + key words. This can also be in storyboard format and can have words to accompany.

Visual journey – Draw and walk a journey through the key process with key moments.

Through line of action – List or draw the beginning, middle and end of the experience with key words, emotions, images, thoughts, ideas. This can be written as feedback to you by an audience member to help you see where the key impacts were or messages were clearest.

Descriptive writing – Describe significant moment in the rehearsal process, in the play you are directing etc. Avoid emotion and state facts. 3^rd person.

Personal writing – Describe significant moments that had an impact on your emotionally or meaningfully. Write your thoughts and feelings in the first person.

Reflective writing – Explain the impact of the moment/s on your work, your approaches and perspectives.

Some areas to reflect on:

Remember that you can reflect on any of the following:

The creative process
The rehearsal process
The research process
The performance itself
The challenges you had and how you overcame them
The feedback you received from an audience
The impact on you as an audience member
How you felt as a performer of text
How you felt being part of an ensemble

If you prefer visual reflection, then you can use tables to help reflect on your work. Look up SWOT diagrams, which help you reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, and helo you identify and think about how to overcome obstacles. Please see the image and link below: