Reflection

The Gift of Reflection

Dr. Deborah Breen

Boston University

The importance of reflection is recognized across time, place and philosophical traditions. Being engaged with self-reflection as an instructor in higher education is a rewarding practice that leads to professional growth (see Stephen Brookfield’s excellent book Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (2^nd ed., 2017) for a wealth of information on this practice). Teaching students, in turn, how to be reflective about their own learning is one of the greatest gifts we can offer as it has the capacity to transform their learning and positively transfer across all domains of their lives.

Why is reflective learning important?

Reflective learning, or metacognition (that is ‘thinking about thinking’) is akin to providing feedback, though in this case, the students provide feedback to themselves rather than (or as well as) their instructors. Just as feedback helps the instructor identify gaps in student learning, reflective practice helps the student understand strengths and weaknesses in their own learning approaches. While there are a number of frameworks to enable students to practice reflection, key elements support them to:

Make sense of their learning experiences;

Reimagine their future learning experiences (Ryan and Ryan, 2015); and

Connect their individual learning experiences to the collective context of learning (Cope and Kalantzis, 2013)

Here are 4 ways of integrating student reflection into your teaching practices and interactive lectures:

1. Book-end reflective activities

Book-end reflective activities as part of the arc of the class: for example, provide students with time in the first week of class to set their own goals for the semester and then ask them to reflect on their progress towards these goals at the end of the semester. Their goals should relate to the learning outcomes of the class (a great way to encourage thoughtful reading of the syllabus!) but may also connect to their individual hopes for intellectual and personal growth. These low-stakes assignments, graded for completion, assist the students in practising reflection as well as provide you with valuable feedback about individuals and the class learning environment.

2. Short reflective activities

Along the way, add short reflective pieces after quizzes and other assessment tasks. Guiding questions ask students to reflect on specific topics, or areas of challenge and how they might address these, as well as identifying areas of success and what they can learn from these as they move on to the next task. You can integrate these activities into class as a form of think-pair-share or assign it as a homework task that is graded for completion. In either case, the aim is to support the reflective process to help students understand their own learning.

3. Quick feedback strategies

Use feedback strategies to bolster reflective practice: one-minute papers and exit tickets are quick strategies to build into your interactive lecture. These mini-reflections give students the opportunity to practice the skills you want them to strengthen. The quick activities also provide both your students and you with information to improve their learning.

4. Allow retakes

Offer students the option to redo test questions they got wrong, with an accompanying reflection on how they identified their mistake and what they did to fix it in their follow-up test. This practice aids them in the transformative aspect of reflection: how to move beyond mistakes into strategies for more complex learning

Self-reflection is a relevant and indispensable critical thinking skill in higher education and beyond. It transforms our understanding of our approaches to learning, whether we are instructors or students. Integrating the practice of reflection into your interactive lectures is a gift to your students that will continue to resonate in their lives long after they have left your class.