Entrepreneurship in Hospitality, Tourism, and Events. Paper Example

Reflective learning entails students thinking about their experiences regarding different topics, such as what they have learned, read, done, or lessons learned from their own lives (Brockbank, McGill, and Beech, 2017, p.45). Reflective learning enables individuals to comprehend how they have helped other people to achieve and what it looks like in a practical environment of learning. Students play an active role in the learning cycle when they let out their thoughts and feelings through reflections (Alexander and Poch, 2017, p.78). This reflective essay explores my experiences alongside my group members in regards to our assigned project associated with brochure concept.

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In maintaining my reflective learning exercise, I considered applying the reflective learning process. This is a process that entails experience description. Describing an experience entails giving information regarding the process situation and thoughts associated with the situation (Li et al., 2019, p.23). In the reflection part, one discusses their reaction towards the experience, their thoughts, feelings, factors that influenced the situation and lessons learned from the experience (Griggs et al., 2018, p.56). In addition, my reflective learning exercise entailed theorizing. Hereby, one looks at how their experience match with their preconceived ideas, how their experiences relate with any formal theories, and the behaviors one think might have changed the outcome. Lastly, my reflective exercise entailed experimentation. In experimentation, one check if there is anything, they can do to change the outcome of the event, the actions they can take in changing same reactions in the future if it all it happens again (Gould, 2016, p.89).

The reflection narrative has given me a chance to think about my experience and realize that it was a learning experience. Without the reflective narration, I would not have given it much thought to the experiences I encountered while working on my project with my group. Indeed, I cannot rule out that group work is a good working experience when handling tasks that require the exchange of information. According to (Abrahams and Singh, 2019, p.6), teamwork fosters creativity and builds trust among the team members. Due to the benefits of group work, I choose to work with a team of two other people they entailed one guy and one lady. We chose to work together, incorporating the ideas learned from the seminar.

On deciding about the topic idea for our brochure, our first idea was on the World Food Tour in Edinburgh. We thought one could have appetizers at different restaurants and have it as a bus tour. On picking this place, we were very confident, and this excited me very much. Thanks to Mhairi came around and turned down the proposal claiming that it was not very much different from the already existing tours and did not have a niche to it. Before Mhairi's advice, I was very much convinced about World Food Tour; however, after the advice, I thought about it more and absolutely agreed and communicated with my group members who also saw some sense and agreed too. We then decided to form a group chat through which we would be communicating on the way forward.

As we had not decided on the right idea, we opted that driving in cinema would definitely be a good idea as we have not heard anyone having it in Edinburgh. This means that that was indeed a unique idea for our group. My suggestion was for my group to make something fun, such as an American drive-in cinema, and everyone agreed and hoped for Mhairi to accept it. Once we forwarded our idea through an email, she gave us a head start for our idea. I was very excited and told my members I would work on the brochure if at all they let me do that because they were not confident in how to create brochures. I told my group members that I would begin on our agreed idea and email them a copy to assess it. At this juncture, I was very happy because the group was progressing so well.

As time went by, we began having our downs, and most of the time, I was the one on the negative end. My two group members started to act so weirdly despite the efforts I put through to ensure the success of our project. Everything was in a mess as no one was interested in anything regarding the project except for me. I was the only concerned party, and most times, I would start a chat conversation to engage them and hear their concerns in regards to the project. This proves that my group lacked proper communication strategy. Communication is a very critical component within the functions of a group as it ensures proper coordination of the planned activities (Fullana et al., 2016, p.1010). Unfortunately, despite all my efforts, they despised my work and even locked me out of their conversations. I felt like I was forcing myself into the group despite doing most of the group work by myself. Even though we managed to finish up the project on time, I was not pleased with the whole experience because I felt they underrated my efforts, which was so demeaning.

I have learned that learning through reflection is the best experience. Reflecting on experience encourages insight and complex learning (Pearson et al., 2018, p.1031). Growth is fostered when learning is controlled, so sometimes, reflection is best when done alone. According to Lindh and Thorgren (2016, p.526), reflection is enhanced when individuals ponder their learning with others. For instance, in my case, my reflection was effective because I pondered my learning with my group people. Reflection learning enables individuals to understand that one can look back on their experiences rather than moving forward (Bruno and Dell'Aversana, 2018, p.350). One of the common ways of leading students into reflection is through discussions. This was the way adopted for our project as we were in group work to discuss various ideas. Ultimately, reflective learning experience is the best because it has enabled me to gain insights on the experiences I had, both positive and negative, while engaging in the group project. All the lessons learned is through participating in teamwork as reflective learning identifies an individual's strengths and base objectives for personal development upon them (Cathro, O'Kane and Gilbertson, 2017, p.431). Also, reflective learning enables one to identify their deficit areas and establish achievable objectives aimed at improving their performance (Silpasuwanchai et al., 2016, p.462). In this regard, I realized the group I was working with was not worth it because I did most of the work alone as they cared less. Due to this, I promised myself I would not work with them the next time given a group project. I will consider working with different people that possess the same work ethics as me and have good communication strategies.

References

Brockbank, A., McGill, I. and Beech, N., 2017. Reflective learning in practice. In Reflective learning in practice (pp. 18-28). Routledge.

Li, F., Chen, T., Chen, N.Y.F., Bai, Y. and Crant, J.M., 2019. Proactive yet reflective? Materializing proactive personality into creativity through job reflective learning and activated positive affective states. Personnel Psychology.

Alexander, I.D. and Poch, R.K., 2017. Improving Performance and Reflective Learning through Video Technologies. Innovative Learning and Teaching: Experiments Across the Disciplines.

Griggs, V., Holden, R., Lawless, A. and Rae, J., 2018. From reflective learning to reflective practice: assessing transfer. Studies in Higher Education, 43(7), pp.1172-1183.

Gould, N., 2016. Introduction: the learning organization and reflective practice-the emergence of a concept. In Social work, critical reflection and the learning organization (pp. 11-20). Routledge.

Abrahams, A.S. and Singh, T., 2019. An active, reflective learning cycle for e-commerce classes: Learning about e-commerce by doing and teaching. Journal of Information Systems Education, 21(4), p.6.

Fullana, J., Pallisera, M., Colomer, J., Fernandez Pena, R. and Perez-Burriel, M., 2016. Reflective learning in higher education: A qualitative study on students' perceptions. Studies in Higher Education, 41(6), pp.1008-1022.

Pearson, R., Koslov, S., Hamilton, B., Shumake, J., Carver, C.S. and Beevers, C.G., 2018. Acetaminophen enhances the reflective learning process. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 13(10), pp.1029-1035.

Bruno, A. and Dell'Aversana, G., 2018. Reflective practicum in higher education: the influence of the learning environment on the quality of learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(3), pp.345-358.

Lindh, I. and Thorgren, S., 2016. Critical event recognition: An extended view of reflective learning. Management Learning, 47(5), pp.525-542.

Cathro, V., O'Kane, P. and Gilbertson, D., 2017. Assessing Reflection: Understanding Skill Development through Reflective Learning Journals. Education & Training, 59(4), pp.427-442.

Silpasuwanchai, C., Ma, X., Shigemasu, H. and Ren, X., 2016, June. Developing a comprehensive engagement framework of gamification for reflective learning. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 459-472).