What does reflection look like and why are we using it … a lot?
Reflection is essential to learning. It often gets short-changed as busy work, when in reality reflection is the work of learning. Reflective spaces allow you to put together the pieces of your learning with the context of your knowledge. This is knowledge gained in other courses, your life experiences, and all the other places you take in information. Reflection is how you make sense of all that you know and begin making connections.
How to think about reflection…
I like to use Jennifer Moon’s work on reflective learning and its relationship to experiential learning. She created a five-stage framework for the learning process that can help us better understand how we work with and through content. From the image below, you can see that Moon’s framework overlays Bloom’s Taxonomy nicely. More importantly though, her framework provides language that helps us clarify our learning goals.
Moon outlines how we traverse new concepts:
- First, through noticing, where Moon (1999; 2001) asserts that “you cannot learn something if you do not notice it at some level (which could be unconscious)” (2001, p. 6).
- Second, by making sense, or engaging with material without connecting it to previous knowledge.
- Third, by making meaning, “there is a sense of meaningfulness but there is not much evidence of going beyond the given” (2001, p. 6).
- Fourth, we begin working with meaning, the process of linking to previous knowledge or other ideas and experiences. “There is a creation of relationships of new material with other ideas” (2001, p. 6).
- Lastly, through transformative learning , current understandings are transformed by new material through reflection. This is the construction of new knowledge – or authoring – “…demonstrat[ing] strong restructuring of ideas and ability to evaluate the processes of reaching that learning” (2001, p. 6).
Again, returning to the image above:
- Noticing and sense-making align with the lower Bloom’s levels (remember and understand). Learners are just trying to comprehend the content.
- Making meaning and working with meaning move into the application and analysis portions of Blooms. Learners have grasped the general concept and are now starting to put the material to work.
- Transformative learning really opens up analysis and evaluation with creation. This is when learners begin to unlock the true excitement of lifelong learning – they begin to create linkages between what they know and have experienced (beyond the content) and create completely new meaning. This last stage is often what many of us look forward to the most in our teaching.
Reflection is essential to this process. As I mentioned above, reflection has power in learning. It is often overlooked or undersold (a belief to “unlearn,” perhaps?). Also, reflection provides an important place of comfort and retreat (Tanaka, 2017), as the learners engage with their previous understandings of what constitutes “valid” knowledge. One approach is to ask learners to “try on” content. This involves providing learners with the space to pull apart what they are learning, engage with it, and determine where it settles in their own learning process before deploying the content in summative ways. Another way to approach this is to provide learners with opportunities to construct their own narratives in safe ways, such as journals and logs that may or may not be shared with the instructor. We will use all of these approaches in this course.