In this tutorial we will walk through how to add a Reflection.
This feature can be used for various purposes such as supporting children or for staff’s own CPD purposes. Read more about the different ways Reflections can be used in our support guide here.
How to add a Reflection
To add a Reflection, you will need to start by making sure you’re logged into the browser version of Tapestry. Next, head to Planning & Monitoring and then Reflections.
To begin, click Add Reflection.
From here you can create your reflection. You can enter a title and then write the details of your reflection. This space can include your thoughts and why you are thinking them, what you plan to do in response to your reflection and any theoretical perspective you may wish to include.
In this box you can also add any hashtags you use in your setting for filtering and sorting purposes later. You can use your own hashtags alongside the Flags to organise your reflections and search for those with the same theme.
The date for the reflection will be filled in automatically with the current date/time, but you can edit it from here.
There are different options when it comes to the Status and Visibility of the Reflection.
For Visibility, you can choose:
- Visible to Author and Managers
- Visible to Author and All Staff
For Status, you can choose:
- Not Ready for Discussion
- Ready for Discussion
- Finished: Embedded in practice
- Finished: Abandoned
Your reflection may be about how you can support a group of children, or it may be about how you can meet the needs of one child in particular. You can choose whether or not to link children to your reflection from the Children section.
If the reflection is not relevant to any specific children, you can select Does not relate to any children.
If you do wish to link children to your reflection you need to select Is for specific children. You will then see a Select children button where you can select the relevant children.
You will then see your selected children appear in the ‘Children’ section on your reflection page.
Linking observations and other reflections to the reflection you are currently working on allows you to show the journey you are on. For example, you may have observations that have triggered the reflection, and others that are evidence of the impact you have made as a result of your reflective practice.
You can link your reflection to other reflections and to observations from the Links section. The blue What’s this button will open a window that explains all about linking reflections and observations.
Clicking on the + Link Observation/Reflection/Activity button will open a pop-up box allowing you to select which observation/reflection/activity you want to link. Returning to your reflection you will see the observations you have linked.
You can un-link an observation or reflection by clicking the red x button.
In the Media section you can add media (photos and videos), audio files or documents such as Word, PDFs, PowerPoints or Excel sheets to your reflection. Just click on Add Files to add single or multiple files, then click Start upload. Once they have been uploaded you have the option of performing edits such as cropping or rotating pictures, deleting any files, either singularly or in bulk, or changing the order of the files using the up and down arrows.
Adding media can help you show what you are thinking and evidence and evaluate the impact of your reflective practice.
You can organise your reflections by adding flags to them and then using the filter and sort tool to find all the reflections with a particular flag. This is really useful if you are preparing for some staff training, a staff meeting about an aspect of whole team practice, or if you would like to show a visitor the reflective journey on a specific theme.
Depending on which flag sets you chose to activate when you enabled Reflections, you will see these on your reflections page now. Select the flag/s you want to include and then back on the Reflections page you will see your selected flags.
Part of the reflection process is to evaluate the outcome of your thoughts and implementations. The Impact box is a space for you to write about what happened. To begin with, you are most likely to save the reflection with this box empty. Once the reflective process has been underway and you can see changes as a result, you can return to this reflection through the edit button and add the outcomes to the impact box.
Don’t forget to save your your reflection. You can also save and add another!
If any further support is needed, get in touch with our support team on customer.service@eyfs.info.
