Give a summary of what you was emphasized in class. This should be a brief summary of the main points of what your professor taught. In a language arts class for teachers, the emphasis is on teaching methods for specific concepts in the language arts. For example, if you are writing a weekly reflective journal for your class and during this week the professor lectured on how to teach analogies, you should summarize the methods that she taught. This could be listing the different kinds of analogies or asking students to give examples of analogies they used that day. Lay out these methods in the summary section.
Describe the new things you learned. Here, you should be listing the novel insights you gained from the classes. This section is fundamentally different from the summary section because you will be explaining how you have grown as a teacher as a result of class. In a language arts class for teachers, you will not likely be learning any new language, but you will probably come in contact with new perspectives on what you had learned before. An example of this is your professor citing a study that shows that students learn to correct their grammatical mistakes more quickly if you only point out the mistake instead of correcting it for them.
State your questions. During the period in which you will be writing your reflective journal, you likely had many questions about the lecture material. Your next step in a reflective journal is to write down these questions. These questions may be those emerging from general topics, precise issues or teaching strategies. As an example, assume your professor taught how to prepare students for essay writing this week. Your professor listed many ways to prepare your students for this task, such as brainstorming and outlining. You may have been wondering at the time which method works best for students on average. You should write down these questions and your thought processes that go along with them in this section of your reflective essay.
Explain your personal reaction. What you have written to this point are facts and information. At the end of your reflective essay, you should jot down your feeling and opinions in reaction to the content and strategies of your class. In this section, you can give your thoughts as to whether you agree or disagree with certain teaching methods or think some aspects of the language arts discussed should have more or less emphasis in schools.