Adult learners bring a wealth of experience and prior learning to college. Much of this prior learning may, in fact, qualify for college credits, so many adults assemble portfolios and write learning narratives to demonstrate their learning and apply for credits. Despite their many skills and rich knowledge, however, adults are often unsure about their ability to establish their prior learning credentials (Arnold, 2010; Lambe, 2011). While adult learners can usually recall what they did in professional contexts or in the community, for example, they have difficulty culling significant elements from experience that relate to learning--identifying learning and making sense of it. Reflecting on past experience, the "return to experience, attending to feelings, and reevaluation of experience" (Boud, 2001, p. 14) is a way to discover what matters most to them and draw conclusions about meaning and learning. Having to reflect on their experiences often baffles adult learners because this expectation contradicts their view of formal learning, which assumes that "real" learning means acquiring disciplinary facts and concepts: "declarative knowledge" (Kurfiss, 1988, p. iv). For this reason, they may struggle recognizing the value of their prior knowledge. Such barrier to reflection can, however, be overcome by using the learning narrative as a vehicle to take a critical look at the past, by discovering failures as events that resulted in learning, and by confirming what they know. The author concludes that encouragement, scaffolding activities, and questions facilitate the reflections that explore the implications of what they have learned and lead to connections to other areas of knowledge at work or home, in the community, or in the classroom.