What you're looking at
Most writing about reflective practice describes the theory. These pages show the output: real work, in the voice of the person who produced it, with notes on the moves that made it land.
Two terms come up throughout, and they are not interchangeable.
A Story Core is the foundation
The structured record a learner creates through the STARR+ reflection process, capturing what happened, what they did, what they learned, and how that learning applies going forward.
Story Works is what you do with it
The tools that adapt one Story Core for different purposes: interviews, résumés, cover letters, scholarship essays, networking conversations, assignments, applications.
Student stories
2 storiesEach one carried from Story Core through Story Works, so you can see what the reflection produced and where every line of it came from.
Applied social science student
From a class project to something I could say out loud
A semester studying food insecurity and food waste became a Story Core, then a 218-word narrative he could tell in an interview. Annotated to show which part of the Core became which paragraph.
Read the storyCriminology senior
One experience, four different answers
The least glamorous job on her capstone team was cleaning messy public datasets. She cut that single experience four ways: an interview answer, a résumé bullet, a portfolio caption, and a full narrative.
Read the storyFacilitator reflections
2 reflectionsTwo practitioners writing about their own sessions: what they did, what shifted, and what they took away. Each closes with notes on the facilitation moves worth borrowing.
Online tutor
From starting over to starting from strength
An adult returning student saw years of managing restaurants and supporting classrooms as irrelevant to college. Nothing about her circumstances changed during the session. The question she was asking did.
Read the reflectionLearning practice coach
Scaffolded reflection as developmental practice
A graduating student could say how his courses felt, but not what he had learned. Written as a full STARR+ story about the coach's own practice, so it doubles as the model for staff reflecting on their facilitation.
Read the reflectionThe growth was already there
None of these four stories describes anything being added to a learner. In every one, the capability was already present. What changed was whether the learner could see it.
Names and identifying details have been changed throughout. The work itself is unedited except for length.