Introduction

Well, it’s been quite the year!  And I’m 100% sure I’m not the only one who can say that.  How has yours been?

So much happens over the course of an academic year – both professional and personal – that it can be tempting to get to the end of it, collapse once the cortisol subsides, complete the burgeoning to-do-list of outstanding tasks, dust oneself off, enjoy a break, and then return to face the mountain again without properly stopping to take stock and smell the roses.

So in this article I am going to do some rose-sniffing (as well as acknowledging some other less pleasant scents that have cropped up along the way), and take a structured approach to reviewing my own personal experience of academic year 25-26.  My hope is that this will model the benefits of engaging in a positive-psychology-informed reflective process, while helping me to process my experiences, extract some useful learning points, maybe experience some catharsis, and hopefully get a mainline injection of that positive emotion that, yes, feels good, but has also been evidenced to broaden-and-build our cognitive and social capacities and capabilities (Fredrickson, 1998, 2005).  At the same time, I’m also hoping that doing so in public might be of help to others, either in terms of you being able to take something from the content of what I’m writing, or perhaps in sparking a motivation to carry out a similar reflective exercise yourself.

My idea for this blog was inspired by Dr Fiona Coley, The Ed Psych Coach (https://www.theedpsychcoach.com/), who at the end of each academic year invites us to take a positive-psychology-informed appraisal of our experiences.  Fi has written a one-side-of-A4 structured reflection tool* that contains various prompts to guide reflection, including ‘Times when I made a difference’, ‘Things I am proud of’, and ‘Most interesting thing(s) I read or learned’, for example.  An end-of-year reflective exercise can often be valuable, and with Fi’s series of structured prompts the embedded positive psychology orientation can steer our attention to some soul-nurturing aspects of our year that might otherwise have got buried in the avalanche of experience.

So, with Fi’s tool as inspiration and guide, here we go with a series of reflections from me about my experience over academic year 25-26.

* The one-side-of-A4 tool is the free version, and you can find that by clicking here.  If you’re looking for something more in-depth, Fi has also written an expanded 'Reflect and Renew' workbook that can be purchased here.  Readers of this article can obtain a £10 discount on the larger workbook by entering the code ASPEN at checkout.