Assessment 1: Reflective Essay – Self-esteem

Assessment 1: Reflective Essay
Due: Session 6
Length: 2300 words maximum
Mark: 100 (30%) Reflection is a critical component in one’s professional and personal life. It provides a sense of meaning to experiences, an opportunity to put these experiences into
perspective, under review and provides an opportunity to change how you see, understand and
experience situations. The reflective process involves reflective thinking and critical thinking and
is a personal response to experiences and new information. It is important to develop our ability
to reflect to inform and develop our helping role. Understanding how this process works and
how we learn can help us appreciate how important the use of reflection is to our learning.
Reflective writing flows from this process of reflection and is a way of exploring your learning, in
identifying your knowledge gaps and areas for improvement and serve as a channel for communicating your response to thoughts, and feelings but more importantly it serves to provide clarity and a better understanding of what you are learning. For a video guide to reflective writing click here. For some food for thought on reflective writing click here. The student’s ability to: examine their thoughts about the content, and what it means for them, offering a unique and independent yet related view, and understanding of the content, will be assessed. Furthermore, the student’s ability to write and reflect will be assessed.

Instructions: Write a reflective essay in which you provide an analysis of your current self-concept and selfesteem. Although this is largely a reflective essay that may be written in the first person, it needs to be grounded in academic literature and theories related to self-esteem.
Write a reflective essay in which you:

1. Describe self-esteem and motivation and further discuss the critical role of self-esteem and motivation in a person’s well-being, development and progression in life.
2. Discuss three to five major factors or events that have been linked to an increase/decrease in self-esteem and motivation, think about the South African context.
3. Explore the factors that have shaped your current self-esteem by identifying and explaining the interaction between internal factors (some examples include appearance, personality, birth order, gender, talents and abilities) and external factors (some examples include significant life events, nature of early caregiving environment, peer relationships).
4. Reflect on moments when you felt your self-esteem was at its lowest and moments when your self-esteem was at its highest. Why do you think it was so?
5. What practices can you engage in to improve your self-esteem? Provide a theoretical explanation to support your answer.
6. Identify one theoretically grounded activity that could be used to improve motivation and provide a description of this activity. Where you provide a quote, a definition or refer to another author’s view, please reference the author in the text and the reference list. It is important that while your answers to some of the questions are literature-based, you phrase them in your own words so that your educator can assess your understanding, application and analysis of the content.