Having come up a couple of times now, it’s probably time to think ‘out loud’ about reflection. Yes, very meta and all, but I’ve come to think that there are two or more different types of reflection. That, of course, would be confusing and thus problematic. So, here are some reflections on reflection.
So, first, I typically talk about reflection as the complement to action: learning is action and reflection. Then, I extend that to say that instruction should be designed action and guided reflection. When I say ‘reflection’ in that sense, it’s everything but the practice: models, examples, and feedback. Which is a simplification, but still not completely wrong.
However, we probably need a tighter definition. Because, for instance, we can ask people to reflect on the content, e.g. an elaborative or generative activity. We can ask them to reflect on their actions in practice. For that matter, we can ask them to reflect on the overall experience. Sure, each is valuable, but they’re different.
So, when we ask people to reflect on models and examples, we’re asking them to make connections between the content and their previous knowledge. That’s whether personal experience or prior learning (or both, of course, intermixed). Which is a necessary part of building their understanding, their schema. We want to enrich those connections, to increase the likelihood of activation in relevant settings.
Then, we ask them to reflect on their performance in retrieval. We can give them feedback, but as they progress that should fade. Indeed, ‘after action’ reviews are just this sort of activity. Learners need to internalize the self-monitoring, to become self-improving learners. So here we could ask them what they did right or wrong before we give them feedback. This, too, is valuable.
We can also ask them to reflect on the overall experience: what worked, what didn’t, what they’d like that they want more of or didn’t see, and what they’d like less of. Here we’re asking them to reflect on the pedagogy: what improvements can we provide? This is valuable more for us, of course, to refine the learning experience, but it’s still useful.
The problem is, we often use the term of ‘reflection’ for all of these. Reflection is great, but we need to deal with the specifics of each. Yes, we can term the elaborative one a ‘generative’ activity, so arguably that’s taken care of. But the other two are still both confounded. We could use the term ‘review’ for the case of overall experience evaluation, if we wanted to remove confusion. However, my main point is not to solve, at least not yet, but instead to point out the issue (this blog is for preliminary thoughts, at least ;). Those are my reflections, what are yours?
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