Reflection and High Impact Practices

Reflection is something that hovers around experiential learning and high impact practices. Eyler, a scholar of service-learning, stated, “there is reason to believe that reflection gets rather short shrift in typical service-learning experiences” (2002, p. 520). Either its origins and theorists are not understood, or its processes are not really applied, or we ask students to reflect in a way that is superficial or simply “evidentiary”, and what I therefore call “rhetorical.”

I would like to explore these three points. My ultimate goal is to create a portable taxonomy of reflection, whether in-action or after-the-fact, that students can be taught. In reaching that goal, I want to make an argument that in our assignment of “reflective papers” we are not so much encouraging or guaranteeing reflection from students (who are not given to reflection naturally) as we are saying, “Prove to me you reflected in a way that I as the instructor am satisfied with your structure, argument, syntax, and grammar.” More on that later.

If there is a question why I am speaking on this subject at a communication conference, well, a few words on that. Communication competency is achieved by experiences, trial and error, and experimentation, as Dewey would call it.  I introduce COMM 1110 students to Kolb’s model of learning the first day:

It is a good, simple model to explain how they will reflect and learn from each speech they give, and they do some sort of reflection after each, either verbal or written. 

As the communication student progresses into service learning, undergraduate research, and internships, the need for reflection grows. But what do we want from that reflection? That’s what this is about.

In terms of my first point, the theorists on reflection, the big names are Dewey, Schon, Boud and Walker, Kolb, Argyris, Jennifer Moon, and Yancey.  Don’t worry, I’m not going into a long analysis of what each says. All of us have our own definitions of reflection anyway; there are probably as many definitions as there are people who talk or write about reflection. Dewey said it was:

“. . . active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (1933, p. 9).

Note that reflection to Dewey is active (as opposed to the passivity we attribute to it as an afterthought of the experience), persistent (not quick but continual), and careful (conscious and in some way procedural).

He went on to add, “The function of reflective thought is, therefore, to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious” (1933, p. 100). Many of us will remember in the 1970s and ‘80s that group discussion courses always found at their center the Reflective Thinking Process, which was the basis for good old Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

·      Recognize the problem

·      Define the problem.

·      Set up criteria for solutions.

·      Brainstorm.

·      Evaluate brainstormed solutions by the criteria.

·      Enact (experiment/pilot if possible)

Monroe’s MS loosely follows the logic; if the persuasive speaker has time, they can subsume each of Dewey’s steps into these five (which would make for a long speech).

·      Attention

·      Need

·      Satisfaction

·      Visualization

·      Action

Even still, Dewey’s outcome of a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious, seems extremely optimistic in a world of complexity and connectivity.

Another definition: “the intentional consideration of experience in light of particular learning objectives” (Hatcher & Bringle, 1997, p. 153). However, whose learning objectives? Does this imply that the prescribed learning objectives of the instructor supercede what might be the students’, or that the students may not have any?

In both cases, the focus is seen by many critics as being on the cognitive or intellectual aspects of the reflective process, whereas Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985) present this model: 

Feelings, “good” and “bad,” cannot be separated that easily from experience and the process of reflecting on it.  The presence, effects, sources, and personal reasons for the feelings one experiences in an “experiential learning” situation are part of the package. Think of the fears and trepidation a student has going into a collaborative, service-learning, or internship type high impact practice—or the dread, or the bravado, or the possibility of failure, or the prediction of its being a waste of time. These are all emotions we and our students have.

Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985) also point out that even listening to a lecture is “an experience.” I like that they accept that. We know lecture is a limited form of teaching, but it is not evil, unethical, passive, pointless, lazy, or any of those extreme adjectives people have put on the process of lecturing to sell books or get a speaking gig at a conference.

Although I could go on with further definitions and theoretical models and viewpoints on reflection, I will end this section with the observation that while there is a body of empirical research about reflection, it is not as strong as it could be. I would imagine that is because reflection is hard to quantify, observe, and locate in an experiment. That does not mean it’s an amorphous nothing, and I don’t want to be understood as saying there is no good research on reflection as a learning process. There is just a lot more “big idea” approaches rather than actual studies.

Secondly, I’d like to move to the subject of a process of reflection for students. I became interested in this subject because I was looking for a taxonomy of reflection. One set of authors from the Netherlands suggest the use of Bloom’s taxonomy as a taxonomy of reflection. I think that’s a good starting point; students should at least be well-versed to the (revised Krathwohl and Anderson version of) Bloom’s taxonomy early in their freshman experience:

I advocate teaching this to freshmen because it will define for the them the essence of how high school and college are different as well as how their college instructors are attempting to move them “up the ladder” through various types of assignments and experiences.

As such, reflection starts with remembering. Reflection cannot continue or be strong without a strong foundation of remembering where facts, emotions, actions, reactions, etc. are recalled in detail and not just in broad silhouettes or “hitting the high points” of the experience. Remembering for many is synonymous with writing. While I reflect mostly through writing and can write just about anyone under the table, I learned a long time ago pages upon pages of journaling is not everyone’s strong suit. Some might only jot key ideas; some might draw (not me!), and some process better by talk and dialogue.

People like me, the writers, tend to think the writing method is the purest form of reflection—it can be done in private with no input from others, it requires moving impressions from one part of the brain to higher ones where language rules and where order, syntax, and grammar matter, and it would be in permanent form.  So be it. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words might also be better than a picture at times. But reflection does not demand writing. What demands writing is the common “reflective paper” we assign. More on that later.

Back to the taxonomy. After the strong foundation of remembering, of pulling up the materials of reflection, we then must understand the experience, and even more, ourselves and ourselves in that experience. This is where more current scholars of reflection focus—in the internal world as well as the external, “objective” world. Typically, we read that “Reflection should cause us to question our assumptions.” What was right, wrong, or better, incomplete, about our thinking before going into the experience? What did we assume that wasn’t questioned before, that we took for granted, hadn’t even realized might be there? To quote the beginner of reflection theorists, Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living (and the unlived life is not worth examining, as I saw on a bulletin board recently).  

It is at this point that I find myself trying to develop a series of questions or queries that might lead us to more remembering and understanding. Here are a few, but they fall short. And perhaps depending on a series of prescribed questions per se might lead us back to the original problem: we want students to reflect on their learning, whether in our colleges or later, on their own initiative, volition, power, and creativity. Should such guidelines that they internalize be broad and flexible, or specific and proscriptive? We might, in an assignment, want them to entertain more specific questions for our own purposes, but I think most of us would prefer the broad and flexible approach for a tool the students can carry through life.

These first two steps in Krathwohl and Anderson re-seeing of Bloom make the rest of the reflection process possible. They can then apply their new knowledge of self and situation to other problems or circumstances; they can see parts and patterns in a broader range of experiences, approaches, people, and challenges.  They can thus evaluate the effectiveness of such, keeping in mind that all this reflection and in-world experience (of the service learning, collaboration, or internship) is being fed by readings, lectures, discussions, and supports in the classroom.

So I arrive at my last point. What do we really want out of students when we assign them to “reflect”? I wish to look at this from a positive and then more critical viewpoint.

First, I think first we want honesty.  We may not always like a response from students that shows their experience was not the end-all and be-all we hoped it would be for them.  We have to accept it. Reflection without honesty is not reflection, but an exercise in pleasing the instructor, giving the instructor what they want, and heaven knows the students have had enough of that in their formal education. Last year one of our communication majors did an internship with our Athletic Department. A nontraditional student, he and I both expected it to be very helpful and a good match for him. It wasn’t, for a number of reasons. Students before him had loved that placement and thrived; he was pretty ho-hum about it.  I could hardly say, “You need to go back and reflect some more until you can find something really positive to say about it in this final reflection paper!” 

Secondly, I think we want to see a process, some time spent, some earnestness and effort in the reflective task. Third, we want to see positive affective and cognitive outcomes at some level, and fourth, we want to see relevance to and congruence with the disciplinary subject the student is majoring in or the course is about. We want that all-purpose word, critical thinking, too—that the student takes some theory or factual material from the classwork and makes the connections between the experience and the abstractions. It may be that their experience supports or does not support the class material, but we want to see them in the act of building those bridges.

All that said, we have high hopes for reflection, but let me argue the other side. Reflection is first not bound by time (or paper length); reflection can go on for many hours, days, months, or longer. Reflection is painful, especially if we give room to the emotional aspects and allow honesty. Reflection may tell us more about ourselves then we want to know, especially when we honestly question our assumptions (never fun, and one of the parts of reflection I find most painful because it usually leads me to conclude I was fully or partially wrong about something for a long time).  And most of all, reflection is not neat or pretty.

So, we assign a reflective paper, and we expect it to be organized into a standard academic paper (introduction, thesis, three or four major arguments or supporting ideas, and a conclusion), a particular length, grammatically correct, tied to theory or class material, and neatly presented. And why are they writing it? To prove to the instructor that either, or both: 1. They have reflected to the extent that the instructor wants (an ambiguous task), and 2. They have learned whatever it was they should have learned (also ambiguous). To add to the ambiguity, the students have not been taught a method or taxonomy of reflection or even what are the theoretical and empirical reasons for using reflection in the first place after a service project, collaboration, job shadow, or internship. 

Do you see the problem here?

The concept of a reflective paper assumes that the reflective process can be neatly packaged into a rhetorical document whose goal is to convince the instructor that something has been done or accomplished. It is not a written version of the reflection process.

So, what are my suggestions?

First, educate students on reflection: the whys, whens, wherefores, and whats of it.

Second, allow them to reflect in their own ways, on their own terms, but still proving it. They could record visually or audio, they could keep a journal, even with some doodlings (I wouldn’t encourage too much of that, but it does help some students express themselves verbally) and collect that as proof of the process. Third, still assign reflective papers—definitely—butt don’t call them that, because they aren’t really that and because the students don’t understand what that means or what you want anyway. Call them something else, such as “Evidence of learning after experience and reflection” papers.

I come to this as an advocate of the Transparency in Learning and Teaching movement. Although there is great value in plopping students down in the middle of ill-defined problems, clarity in explaining what you are going to assess them on is a different matter. Depending on the level of student, make clear what you expect in this “evidence of learning” paper so that they are struggling with the ideas, the problems, and the solutions, not with assignment expectations. 

I taught a sort of first year experience class in fall semester and we discussed this problem. I told them frankly that if they are assigned a reflection paper, press the instructor to explain what exactly what was actually being assigned. If a student thinks that a dishonest paper will please the instructor and get the grade he or she wants, they will in most cases go with the dishonest paper. If the student knows that reflection is a personal and messy process and what the instructor wants is a paper that explains what was learned as a result of the reflection that is a different matter.

To end this rambling, keep the reflection process the reflection process and the rhetorical process—invention, structure, style, audience analysis, argument—the rhetorical process.