Unlocking Potential: Defining Learning and Reflection

Introduction

In the realm of education and personal development, the concepts of learning and reflection are paramount. We, as teachers, can deliver great lessons for our students, but without the right amount of time to reflect and assess, students may not have optimal learning or the chance to maximize their understanding. Reflection is consciously looking at and exploring your experiences, feelings, thoughts and/or actions to derive new meaning and learn from it. Active reflection can be a valuable tool for growth. This article delves into the definition of learning and reflection, exploring their importance, methods to promote self-reflection, and their impact on personal and professional growth.

Defining Learning

Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, behaviors, or values. It involves understanding, internalizing, and applying information to adapt to new situations or solve problems. Learning can occur through various means, including formal education, self-study, experience, and social interaction.

Defining Reflection

Reflection, in the context of learning, is a metacognitive process where individuals actively analyze their experiences, actions, and thought processes to gain deeper insights and understanding. Reflection occurs when students and teachers think about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what they have learned. It is the linchpin of project-based learning (PBL). It goes beyond mere recall or description, encouraging learners to critically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, identify areas for improvement, and adjust their strategies for future learning. As opposed to “one size fits all” assessments that often leave students behind, reflection promotes equitable access to deeper learning opportunities and outcomes.

The Significance of Self-Reflection in Learning

The importance of self-reflection in learning was recognized by the IB in 2018 when they chose to completely include self-reflection in all learning and teaching. With that change, self-reflection becomes a part of the learning process instead of a separate or optional step.

Metacognition and Thought Processes

Self-reflection is also ideal for metacognition (thinking about thinking). After all, how can you be a better learner if you don’t consider your own thought process? When we learn passively, we don’t have enough time to reflect on our learning or the lessons, which means we are unlikely to draw upon the information again.

Read also: Understanding PLCs

Self-Evaluation and Personal Growth

Additionally, self-reflection also means students have a chance to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses and establish a path of positive self-evaluation that, importantly, includes speaking about any negatives. This helps students to track their own achievements and progress, promotes ownership over their work for growth and allows students to analyze their own learning.

Increased Engagement and Retention

After learning tasks, if students are encouraged to reflect on their own work, you’ll better retain their full engagement in class and also help embed concepts over a longer period of time. In this way, self-reflection helps us improve our memory and keeps our minds active, and it is ideal for looking back on learning.

Equitable Access

As opposed to “one size fits all” assessments that often leave students behind, reflection promotes equitable access to deeper learning opportunities and outcomes.

Methods to Promote Self-Reflection in Learning

Reflection can be done in a number of ways, but we’ve put together some ways you can encourage your students to engage more in self-reflection, as well as some suggestions on how you can gain qualitative data to inform your teaching.

Goal-Setting

Make sure your students set goals (this can be done with or without your guidance) and then evaluate progress towards achieving them, remembering to note down progress and adjust any goals as necessary.

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Reflective Letters

Encourage your students to write a letter to themselves at some point in the future (try their end-of-summer selves). Ask them to think about what kinds of things they want that future self to keep in mind. Consider posing questions such as: “What subjects and topics have you enjoyed learning about this past year?” and “What do you hope to learn in the future?” You might even have your students make a list of SMART goals to set for themselves and challenge them to achieve as many as they can before the end of the next school year.

Exit Tickets

Exit tickets are short activities that ask students a few questions about the lesson. For example, did you understand today’s lesson? Or what area(s) did you find most difficult today? They are ideal for self-reflection in learning because they take into account which students do or do not understand the lesson material and can help those who are struggling. This is also a great way to gain insights and qualitative data to help you as you can better understand the minds of your students by reading exit tickets. Much in the same way, within Exact Path and many of our other solutions, students can review their scores from activities completed, which means they can see what they may or may not have understood. This means that students can see their results immediately and even try to improve their scores in real-time. This helps develop subject mastery but also means you, as a teacher, can gain valuable data for insights that will help inform your instruction.

Understanding Cards

You can give students three cards - a green, a yellow, and a red card. Each of these cards represents something about how students feel about the lesson material. Green represents that students understand the lesson material, yellow means they need a small amount of extra help, and red means they don’t understand. You can ask your students to close their eyes prior to holding up a card and then raise which card they feel best suits them. You’ll gain an understanding of which students understand the lesson material and which do not. This is a great way to gain qualitative data to inform your teaching and really help you understand how students are progressing. You can then easily differentiate their attainment and set the green group extension work, the yellow group follow-up work for revision, and provide the red group with additional support.

Poetic Reflection

Poetry isn’t just great for the soul, it’s also a great way of getting to know your students better. Take a moment to read a reflective poem of your choice to your class-something that is both relatable and inspirational. Then, give students some time to come up with their own reflective poems. Ask them to use their poems to describe what their journey in your classroom has been like since the beginning of the year, how they have changed, and what they have learned. Once everyone has completed a draft of their poems, invite them to share with the class. You can even try having students share in true slam poetry fashion (including snaps after each reader). However you go about it, be sure to emphasize that this exercise is not about perfection, judgment, or comparison-it’s simply a chance for everyone to get creative and share their thoughts.

Pair and Share

With this method, students pair up and ask each other some questions about the lesson material. These questions are designed to get the students thinking and reflecting for themselves. Some questions to begin with include: How did they do? Did they understand everything? What could be done better? This method is easy to carry out in the classroom, and you can also listen to these conversations and gain qualitative data to determine any trends that may emerge, which can help with adjusting instruction.

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Journals or Diaries

Another way of promoting self-reflection in learning is to give students the task of recording their feedback in journals or diaries. By filling in journals or diaries, you can encourage your students to focus on their own journeys and adjust their learning. By writing down ideas, students have an outlet to reflect on their thought processes, which provides them with insight into their progress. By keeping a journal or diary, students can assume responsibility for driving their education forward, and this places them at the center of their learning. It also provides teachers with a working document of a student’s learning journey so they can better understand their abilities and feelings and where any additional support may be required. This is a great approach for gaining qualitative data as you can assess the emotions across the class and determine whether there are any students who are struggling. This is why we designed Exact Path with Mastery Trophies, which are awarded to students each time they work on their individualized learning pathways. Afterward, you can see this data to help your progress monitoring and for informing teaching. Each set of up to four skills is then assessed via a short Progress Check to demonstrate mastery and reward understanding. For every skill that students demonstrate mastery on their Progress Check, they earn a Trophy. They can record their Mastery Trophies in a journal or diary to see their accomplishments and note down the next steps they have in their learning and anything they didn’t understand.

Frameworks for Reflection

Gibbs’ reflective cycle is a great tool to guide you regardless of what method of reflection is chosen. There are a lot of wonderful tools available to assist with the reflection process. Reflective Journal - This could be a physical journal or a public blog. What worked really well today? How did the experience make you feel? Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging primarily in the length of the content. Start with the basics: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

Types of Reflection

Reflections have been described based on their timing, depth, and content.

Time-Dependent Conceptualization

To understand the time-dependent conceptualization of reflection, we return to Schön (1983). He defines two particular concepts-“reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action”-which are delineated based on the time that the reflection takes place. Reflection-in-action is characterized as practitioners reflecting while simultaneously completing the relevant action. Reflection-on-action encompasses a practitioner reflecting on a past action, analyzing the different influences, and carefully considering the observed or potential outcomes. Later work built on this initial description of time-dependent reflections. In particular, Loughran renamed the original two timings to make them more intuitive and added one time point (Loughran, 2002a). The three categories include: “anticipatory,” “contemporaneous,” and “retrospective,” wherein actions taken, or to be taken, are contemplated before, during, and after an educating experience, respectively.

Depth-Based Conceptualization

Conceptualizing reflection in terms of depth has a long history in the literature. Thankfully, Larrivee (2008a) designed a depth-classification system that encompasses an array of terminologies and explanations pre-existing in the literature. During the pre-reflection stage, educators do not engage in reflections. They are functioning in “survival mode” (Larrivee, 2008a, p. 350; Campoy, 2010, p. 17), reacting automatically to situations without considering alternatives and the impacts on the students (Larrivee, 2008a; Campoy, 2010). At this stage, educators may feel little agency, consider themselves the victims of coincidental circumstances, or attribute the ownership of problems to others such as their students, rather than themselves (Larrivee, 2008a; Campoy, 2010). They are unlikely to question the status quo, thereby failing to consider and adapt to the needs of the various learners in their classrooms (Larrivee, 2008a; Campoy, 2010). While the description of educators at this level is non-ideal, educators at the pre-reflection level are not ill intended. However, the pre-reflective level is present among practitioners, as evidenced in a 2015 study investigating 140 English as a Foreign Language educators and a 2010 analysis of collected student reflections (Campoy, 2010; Ansarin et al., 2015). The presence of pre-reflective educators is also readily apparent in the authors’ ongoing research. The first true level of reflection is surface reflection. At this level, educators are concerned about achieving a specific goal, such as high scores on standardized tests. However, these goals are only approached through conforming to departmental norms, evidence from their own experiences, or otherwise well-established practices (Larrivee, 2008a). In other words, educators at this level question whether the specific pedagogical practices will achieve their goals, but they do not consider any new or nontraditional pedagogical practices or question the current educational policies (Campoy, 2010). At the pedagogical level, educators “reflect on educational goals, the theories underlying approaches, and the connections between theoretical principles and practice.” (Larrivee, 2008a, p. 343). At this level, educators also consider their own belief systems and how those systems relate to their practices and explore the problem from different perspectives. A representative scenario at this level includes: teachers contemplating their various teaching methods and considering their observed outcomes in student comprehension, alternative viewpoints, and also the current evidence-based research in education. Subsequently, they alter (or maintain) their previous teaching practices to benefit the students. In doing so, more consideration is given to possible factors than in surface reflection. This category is quite broad due to the various definitions present in the literature (Larrivee, 2008a). The last level of reflection categorized by Larrivee is critical reflection, wherein educators consider the ethical, moral, and political ramifications of who they are and what they are teaching to their students (Larrivee, 2008a). An approachable way of thinking about critical reflection is that the practitioners are challenging their assumptions about what is taught and how students learn. In doing so, educators evaluate their own views, assertions, and assumptions about teaching, with attention paid to how such beliefs impact students both as learners and as individuals (Larrivee, 2005, 2008b).

Content-Based Reflection

The third type of reflection is one in which what is being reflected on is the defining feature. In a technical reflection, educators evaluate their instructional practices in light of the findings from the research on teaching and learning (Valli, 1997). The quality of this type of reflection is based on the educators’ knowledge of this body of research.

Reflection as an Ongoing Practice

Traditionally many educators think of reflection as a “follow-up” to an experience and use the term “debrief” to describe this post experience wrap up. I encourage educators to instead view reflection as ongoing engaging “practice” that we begin with our groups from the moment they walk in the door (or maybe even before with pre-group journaling or questionnaires).

Reflection and Service-Learning

Reflection is an essential component of service-learning. It turns a simple service experience into a meaningful learning experience. Critical reflection should ask students to connect their experiences with the content and theories they have learned in their academic courses. Reflection is not simply a descriptive debrief. It is a way of drawing connections among our experiences, perspectives and disciplinary theories. Critically reflecting is not an easy process. It should challenge assumptions and push students to think deeply about themselves, the ways they relate to others, and the things they learn. Objectively report what happened. Consider the broader implications of the service experience.

Reflective Learning

Reflective learning involves actively monitoring and assessing your knowledge, abilities, and performance during the learning process, in order to improve the process and its associated outcomes. Reflective learning can be beneficial in various ways and in various contexts, so it’s often worthwhile to engage in it.

Benefits of Reflective Learning

There are many potential benefits to reflective learning:

It can help you assess your situation, for example by prompting you to identify gaps in your knowledge and areas where you need to improve.
It can help you figure out how to improve your learning process, for example by prompting you to figure out which learning techniques work well for you and which ones don’t.
It can help you understand yourself better, for example by prompting you to consider what kind of assignments or information you struggle with the most.
It can help you develop your general metacognitive skills, by training you to think critically about how you learn.
It can increase your feelings of autonomy and control, by making you feel that you’re actively in charge of your learning process.
It can increase your motivation to learn, by making you feel more in control of the learning process, and by making that process more deliberate and effective.
It can improve your learning outcomes, both directly, by helping you modify the learning process, as well as indirectly, through the other benefits that it offers, such as increased motivation.

Accordingly, many studies have shown that reflective learning can lead to personal growth and improved learning.

How to Be Reflective in Your Learning

Being reflective in your learning means thinking about what you’re learning and how you’re learning it, in a way that helps you understand yourself and your learning better. There are several things that you can reflect on:

Your understanding of the material.
Your understanding of how to implement what you’ve learned.
Your learning process.
Your abilities, preferences, and thoughts.
Your goals.

You can reflect on these things in various ways and to different degrees. When doing all this, you can use various questions to guide your reflection.

Reflective Learning as a Shared Activity

Reflective learning can be something that you do by yourself or together with others. When done as a shared activity, reflective learning can take many forms.

How to Encourage Reflective Learning in Others

To encourage reflective learning in others, you can:

Explain what reflective learning is.
Explain why reflective learning can be beneficial.
Explain how people can generally engage in reflective learning, potentially using relevant examples.
Explain how they specifically can engage in reflective learning, potentially using relevant examples.
Create an environment that is conducive to reflective learning, for example by giving people enough time to engage in reflection.
Guide people’s reflection directly, for example by asking them questions that prompt them to think about their learning.

Reflective Practice

Reflective practice involves actively analyzing your experiences and actions, in order to help yourself improve and develop. The terms reflective learning and reflective practice refer to similar concepts, and because their definitions vary and even overlap in some cases, they are sometimes used interchangeably.

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