![]() If you intend to encourage your students to engage in regular reflection, their first few entries will usually provide some clues about their individual depth of reflection. Have a quick open discussion to clarify assumptions and expectations about how learners perceive reflection so that you can minimize a likely potential mismatch between your expectations and your students’ preconceived notions about what engaging in reflection entails. Hopefully they may prompt your students to move beyond surface-level “reflection” to a position where they don’t consider integrating the reflection component a waste of time.ġ. Presented here are three simple ideas you might like to consider that have worked well for me during my years of researching learner reflection and integrating it into my classrooms. This is also common across disciplines, more perceptible in some than in others. In most cases, learners rarely move beyond the tip of the iceberg instead they tend simply to describe habitual activities or what they did in a task or course. Some also confess that they are inclined to overstate their learning in order to cast a positive light on what they got out of a particular learning episode. While few are naturally reflective or drawn to such thinking processes, most learners have expressed that they feel genuinely uncomfortable talking about themselves and/or are reflecting simply to fulfill an assigned task. Prior to a reflection task, I have often asked my students to candidly share their thoughts about engaging in reflection. Yet anyone who has attempted to implement reflection in his or her teaching will have encountered learner resistance. Reflection has been one of the most commonly used pedagogical tools by teachers and teacher-educators across a wide variety of disciplines ever since the ancient Greek philosophers first identified it as a way of learning. 179).Īs educators, many of us have probably been asked to reflect in writing on our learning experiences or have asked our students to engage in written reflection. ![]() The end goal, self-regulated learning, as defined by Hadwin (2008), involves “the deliberate planning, monitoring and regulating of cognitive, behavioral and affective or motivational processes towards completion of an academic task” (p. Through reflection, learners develop their ability to integrate the insights they gain into their learning/life experience so that they can make better choices and improve their learning (Rogers, 2001). Reflection is, however, intrinsically linked to metacognition and self-regulation, where there is ample evidence as to their importance to learning (e.g., Bartimote-Aufflick, Bridgeman, Walker, Sharma, & Smith, 2016 Chen, Chavez, Ong, & Gunderson, 2017 Lang, 2012). Yet the void of ecologically valid classroom-based research on incorporating reflection to improve student learning has left teachers largely on their own when it comes to creating opportunities for reflection in their courses. In examining the depth of reflection, Rogers (2001) made an influential and careful study and synthesis, while Peltier, Hay, and Drago (2005) put forward a way to evaluate different levels of reflective thinking, which include habitual actions, understanding, reflection, and critical reflection (refer to Weimer, 2012). Dewey was the first to point out that experience alone does not constitute learning instead, a conscious realization must occur for the experience to become a source of learning. In education, the concept of reflection dates back to the work of John Dewey (1933), who defined it as “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusion to which it tends” (p. ![]() Educators have long recognized the importance and applicability of critical reflection across a wide range of educational settings, yet in practice it remains a challenging and nebulous concept for many to firmly grasp.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |