reflection

• Hacker. The handbook describes “reflecting on your writing” and includes a “reflective letter for a portfolio.”
• OWL. The Purdue OWL mentions reflection a lot but doesn’t, as far as I can tell, offer a complete explanation of the process. Go figure.

Introduction

I first came on the idea of reflection in the work of a philosopher I love. Paul Ricouer argues that we understand not by learning and using facts or skills but by reflecting:

1. We look back at an experience or text and let the experience/text speak to us while we listen from where we are now. We sorta embody the text/experience (again). So I start to understand how to climb the hill at Blue Mound on my bike by recalling my experience climbing it. I play a movie in my mind. I do the same with understanding what Ricoeur says about reflection. I recall what I did with the text. For me, this means looking again at my notes and marked up text.
2. We re-say the text/experience from where we are now. I analyze what I did on the climb or in my reading. For me, this involves writing so that I can see what I’m saying.
3. After listening and re-saying, we interpret and make use of the meaning we have found. I look at my re-saying and pull out of it strategies and ideas that I want to use going forward maybe to change what gears I chose or what concepts I will use.

In the 1990s, bell hooks got me thinking about why reflection matters in education. I like her ideas about democratic education, education as a “practice of freedom.” This kind of education is about seeking wholeness and well-being. Learners and teachers both keep the space of learning open. Everyone is responsible for bringing and sharing what they know and wonder about. Everyone talks in their own voice and also listens to the voices of others. Everyone is responsible explores what is being said and is open to changing their mind based on what they hear. Learning and growth comes out of reflection. So I started to ask my students to reflect.

Reflection got even more interesting to me again ten years later when I was thinking a lot about how college students got to be good at using college to learn and develop. I read a good bit of Donald Schön, the guy who put something called “reflective practice” on the map. Jim Gee explains reflective practice this way. People who are good at learning and teaching (and, it turns out, video games) appear to

1. probe their experiences and texts (think about moving around a video game and clicking on things)
2. make guesses (Gee calls these guesses “hypotheses”) about what the experience or text mean for them now in their world
3. reprobe their experiences and texts to test their guess and to see what happens this time
4. use what happens as feedback and rethinks their guess about their experience or text

Probe, make a guess, reprobe, get feedback and rethink. Reflection.

Reflection in this Class

You will be doing a lot of reflective thinking and writing in this course. For a start, let’s go with the definition of reflection offered by the University of Portsmouth’s Student Life site. It’s a three-step process:

1. Description. Think (and write) about what was done. You invest time and energy describing some past experience or event. If you don’t dig into details, you won’t get far.
2. Interpretation. Assess (and write about) what happened, what did and didn’t work, and what you think about it.
3. Outcome. Evaluate critically what you might do differently in the future and explain why.

When I ask us to reflect, this is more or less what I’ve got in mind.

Reflection on Feedback

One really important kind of reflection you will do involves feedback you are getting about your composing. Researchers generally agree that learners learn when they get feedback. It seems that feedback is a more effective teaching tool if the learner reflects on the feedback and considers how she or he will alter knowledge and practices based on what another learner or teacher noted. You will get feedback from me and from your peers. Many times during the semester, you will share with a group some text–an idea for developing a text, a reading of a text, a text for reading–and request feedback. Once this group process is finished, each of us will need to think about what other writers thought of our performance and how we want to make use of their feedback. The questions below outline a process reflecting on feedback.

What happened?

Record objectively what writing group members said or what the teacher said during a conference or what the comments in the margin seem to say or what happened in a group meeting.  Consider reviewing related rubrics or instructions as part of this process.

What do I think of my work now?

You never need to accept all of the comments you receive, but you do need to be open to thinking differently about what you have written.  Review the observations that you recorded in the first step and explain in writing how your understanding of a text or a performance or a strategy has changed based on considering some data.

What will I do next?

Speculate about how you will respond to feedback you are developing and interpreting. If you write concretely, you may develop a revision plan or a new strategy in the process.

reflection as educational practice (optional)

I’m offering here a bit from a book that a friend and I just finished. We wrote up what we discovered in a study of 12 Minority-Serving Colleges and Universities. Optional reading to be sure. It will give you a better idea for why I make such a big deal of reflection. Let me know if you want any of the references that Clif and I cite.

As we listened to students, staff, and faculty describe their approaches to reflection, we came to appreciate that for them reflection was not only a practice but also an educational outcome. They were engaged in what the authors of How People Learn (2000) described as a metacognitive approach to education: students were learning strategies for “explicating, elaborating, and monitoring the understanding necessary for independent learning” (67). They were practicing with models that guided reflection and participating in a setting in which understanding is jointly negotiated. By looping, students stepped back from their problem-solving to generate their own feedback on how they were approaching problems, why they were taking those approaches, and what results they were achieving. As importantly, students expected to share with others new understandings of course content, new solutions to problems, and new processes for solving problems. Teachers established spaces in which sharing was routine.

            This kind of reflection was not simply self-evaluation. Students are often not particularly good at evaluating their own learning and generating the feedback that they need to move forward (Evans 2013). Looping involves students learning how to describe and analyze their own learning practices in light of feedback they receive from peers and experts. The instructors at the Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) were scrambling to find ways to teach this kind of reflection and to practice it with their students. One San Diego City College (SDCC) math faculty mused that he was infusing reflection on problem-solving into an already packed curriculum. He did so because he saw students’ progress when they became able to talk about what they were doing and why. Their success, he strongly believed, was worth transforming his classes. Decades of research on learning confirm his belief.

            Infusing reflection into the curriculum seems to have great potential to transform not just courses but the undergraduate experience as well. The Teaching for Transfer (TFT) course developed by Kathleen Blake Yancey and others at Florida State University over the past decade serves as a case study. The TFT curriculum emerged from inquiry into a first-year composition curriculum “designed to support students’ transfer of writing knowledge and practice” to other settings (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak 2014, 4). Put simply, the curriculum is designed to develop students’ capacities to solve challenges in writing across and beyond their education. The curriculum has three core curricular elements: “(1) key rhetorical terms, (2) reflection, and (3) students’ articulation of a theory of writing” (Taczak and Robertson 2016, 45). In a TFT course, reflection is both a key word and a practice. In class, students read and discuss what reflection is and how it relates to writing. Most assignments ask students to reflect on how they are making use of course concepts to do the work of writing. In-class and out-of-class activities ask students to engage routinely in a four-part practice:

(1) look backward to recall previous knowledge, which could include prior writing experiences, different reading assignments, and past knowledge about writing; (2) look inward to review the current writing situation they are working in; (3) look forward to project how their current knowledge about writing connects to other possible academic writing situations; and (4) look outward to theorize how the role of their current identities as reflective writing practitioners connects to larger academic writing situations. (46).

            Findings from assessment of the project show that students in a TFT course take the time to explain how what they have done might inform what they might do in other settings. They practice determining what knowledge and practices to roll forward. Perhaps most important, they “theorize” ways in which they can contribute to real-world situations and not merely fulfill course assignments to receive grades. They are invited to envision their education as preparation for communicating ideas in other classes and in the professions to which they aspire.

            The TFT project is focused primarily on promoting the capacity of individual students to transfer their writing knowledge and practices. We suggest that this framework also formalizes looping and describes a feedback landscape that supports collaborative learning. Making space for reflection requires making reflection a routine activity in shared endeavors. Learners are invited to probe a real problem space and try solving real problems together. Addressing a problem triggers reflection—this is part of the script. As they reflect, students look back and, with input from others, validate their attempt: they did indeed try the problem and brought to that prior experiences, knowledge, and skills. Looking back means looking inward and engaging in self-assessment about their initial foray, and how it did or did not move toward their intended outcomes. Reflection does not stop with self-assessment. Learners also look forward and outward, projecting ways in which their knowledge and skills as well as their identities as problem solvers position them to contribute in their subsequent engagement in networks of problem-solvers.   

            By including space for reflection, a feedback landscape guides learners to probe the designated problem space with self-assessment in mind. Far from simple evaluation of a performance using abstract criteria, each participant reflects on how they might contribute to the shared endeavor. Reflection requires individuals to negotiate between multiple channels of feedback as they make sense of their own contributions and their next steps. Spaces for reflection are spaces in which learners expect to listen to others and to deal with uncertainty and often conflicting information as they crystallize and express what they are bringing to the shared endeavor. Feedback that makes space for reflection sets learners up to return to problem-solving informed by feedback from themselves and others.

            An undergraduate education that takes reflection seriously creates space through assignments, activities, assessments that invite students, staff, and faculty to look back at and claim learning that they have done so as to bring knowledge, experience, and skill to what they are doing now and imagine doing next. Writing reflectively, Yancey reminds us, is a “mechanism for claiming and legitimating learning” (2016, 305; emphasis in original). Designing reflection into undergraduate education means that participants routinely unsettle what they thought they knew, seek out feedback from others, and offer feedback to others.