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Structured
Reflection
This posting below, by Anne Colby,
Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold, looks at how "structured
reflection" can help students see alternative ways of interpreting a given
educational experience.
It is from Chapter 12, Learning
through Structured Reflection, in the book, Educating for Democracy:
Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement, published
by:
- Jossey-Bass
- A Wiley Imprint
- 989 Market St.
- San Francisco,
CA 94103-1741
- Copyright:
- The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching
- 51 Vista Ln.
- Stanford,
CA 94305
All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.
Learning
through Structured Reflection
Reflection is widely considered to be
the core of higher education, especially liberal education, which was once
playfully described as teaching students to analyze Freud from a Marxian
perspective and Marx from a Freudian perspective. Our central question in this
chapter is how to use structured reflection to help students consider their
experiences through lenses that bring the political dimensions into focus. This
kind of reflection plays a pivotal role in helping them understand and navigate
the real world of political possibility, conflict, and uncertainty.
Structured reflection requires students
to step back from their immediate experience to make sense of it in new ways.
The object of their reflection could be a newspaper story or scholarly article,
their observations while working in a government office or private nonprofit,
some kind of political action, or some combination of these and other
experiences. Making experiences into objects of reflection means simultaneously
heightening their impact while attempting to understand them in connection with
any number of other thing: concepts, issues, or experiences arising from other
course components; one's past academic learning or personal history, one's
values, assumptions, and convictions; theoretical or other conceptual or
analytic lenses, and the like. In the process, students observe, analyze,
examine, and consider their political experiences from multiple points of
view.
Of course, one can imagine an almost
endless number of frames, lenses, or filters through which to reflect on a
given experience, and the choice of frames helps determine the character of the
meaning derived from reflection. Different aspects of the experience become
salient and take shape. Considering the perceptual and cognitive power of
alternative interpretive schemes underscores how important it is for faculty to
help students consider their political experiences in terms that contribute to
the overall purposes and goals of the course or program.
Reflection has the power to reframe
experiences and events in new terms. As a result, even when some course or
program experiences, such as working in a direct service environment, are not
explicitly political in nature, guided reflection can help students recast them
in political terms by connecting their direct service with relevant policy
environments or systemic analyses of the needs the organization addresses. A
Duke University student, for example, talked about how structured reflection on
her internship at the refugee resettlement branch of the Catholic Charities of
New Mexico led her to study immigration policy and the process of seeking
refugee status.
A widespread misconception about
structured reflection is that it entails simply sharing feelings or voicing
opinions. Many people mistakenly see reflection as a "feel-good" experience
that may be useful for building community but does not contribute to
intellectual development. In fact, poor quality reflective activities do
sometimes fit this description. In contrast, in well-conceived reflective
activities, emotional responses and initial opinions may serve as starting
points but not as ends. High-quality reflection calls for well-developed
intellectual skill and perceptiveness richly grounded in knowledge and
expertise. Although undergraduate students are not experts in the process of
reflection any more than they are experts in the subject matter they are
studying, well-conceived and well-structured assignments can help them develop
greater expertise in the intellectual processes of reflection, analysis, and
interpretation as they work toward greater subject matter expertise.
The importance of structured reflection
is not simply an article of faith. Extensive research on community service
learning shows that the quantity and quality of reflection is consistently
associated with both academic and civic learning. Engaging regularly in
structured reflection leads students to deeper understanding and better
application of subject matter knowledge and increased knowledge of social
agencies, increased complexity of problem and solution analysis, and greater
use of subject matter knowledge in analyzing problems (Eyler and Giles, 1999).
Reflective practices in the classroom have also been shown to help learners
connect earlier experiences to new content in order to achieve better
understanding of the new material (Lee and Sabatino, 1998).
References:
Lee, D. and Sabatino, K. "Evaluating
Guided Reflections: A US Case Study." International Journal of Training and
Development 1998, 2(3), 162-170.
Eyleer, J. and Giles, D.E. Where's the
Learning in Service-Learning? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Learning
through Structured Reflection
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