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“Reflection in Engineering Education Workshop” at University of Washington

In the final year of CPREE, the consortium hosted a two-day workshop on “Reflection in Engineering Education,” attended by over 60 educators from 22 institutions across the U.S. and abroad. This workshop built on the documented CPREE reflection activities, as well as the CPREE team’s experience working with educators to integrate reflection activities into their teaching. Specifically, workshop participants were invited to:

  1. examine reflection activities that have been conducted by engineering educators,
  2. explore strategies for choosing or creating a reflection activity to integrate into teaching practices,
  3. practice adapting a reflection activity to one’s own teaching practice, and
  4. identify possible ways to use reflection activities in future teaching.

By the completion of the workshop, participants were able to take away a clearer understanding of reflection, a repertoire of sample reflection activities, an initial draft of a reflection activity tailored to their own teaching setting, and a network of like-minded colleagues.

Click the thumbnail below to download a PDF of the workshop workbook.

thumbnail of cover for reflection workshop workbook

news, research, resource

Reflection at ASEE 2016

Reflection was a cross-cutting thread again at the 2016 ASEE annual conference, as illustrated by the selection of papers below. The first three papers are work done by members of CPREE. As illustrated by the additional papers, there is broad interest in reflection in engineering education.

activity, general, news, practices

Digging in for the Second Year of CPREE

Having just wrapped up a strong first year, CPREE educators across our 12 partner campuses are gearing up for an exciting start to the second. From setting up mini-grants to facilitate awardees in implementing reflective practices of their own design to engaging other faculty members and instructors around them in questions of how reflective practices can benefit classrooms in a variety of disciplines, our members have been busy helping to bring meaningful change in engineering education across the country. We wanted to share some of their stories to highlight the important work they are doing as well as provide inspiration to others looking to do the same.

 Arizona State University – Polytechnic Campus – Kristy Csavina and Adam Carberry

It was exciting to read the mini-grant applications and learn of the reflective practices already adopted by faculty within the Fulton Schools of Engineering. We have successfully completed our kick-off meetings and have 12 new mini-grant awardees spanning across the six engineering schools at ASU. The team includes instructors, tenure-track, and tenured faculty with a range of discipline expertise as well as years of experience teaching. Each has used a form of reflection in their classrooms prior to CPREE, some more innovative than others. In addition to this, many faculty have already expressed interest in our new ‘mentor a colleague program’. We expect another 6-12 faculty to join our team between now and January 2016.

Bellevue College – Frank Lee

The reception of the CPREE Field Guide at the start-of-the-year Science Division meeting was very positive; many faculty new to CPREE expressed interest in participating and implementing a reflection activity in their course.

“At first when I heard about reflection I thought it would be fluff, but now that I see the activities, it looks very useful and am interested in doing [it],” said a Chemistry Faculty member.

We think there are many great ideas and applications in the field guide collection. We are attempting a preliminary grouping of the entries into common categories as a way to more efficiently direct educators to entries that might be of interest for their needs.

California Polytechnic Institute and State University – Trevor Harding

Our participation has doubled from 15 faculty and 2 students last academic year to 35 faculty participants this year. Our new members hail from the Humanities, Chemistry and Physics departments and bring with them highly divergent experiences with reflection, the experienced ones including it in nearly every course they teach while others are just beginning to explore what reflection is and how they might use it.

While reflecting on what they had learned, a participant in our collaborative inquiry dialogue group found that “[the] freeform discussions not only expand my horizons, but also remind me of the power of simply taking the time to sit down and talk with others.”

Clarkson University- John Moosbrugger

Having established our mini-grant fund, we now have 8 mini-grant awardees engaged in reflective practices and are looking to recruit more. In our ongoing efforts to invite more participation from faculty, we have found the most effective method is to meet with them individually. Often, we find that they are already incorporating or planning to include activities in their courses that are reflective in nature. The main “barrier” seems to be making the communication happen. Since we are situated on a geographically small campus, it is also more efficient to conduct face-to-face project meetings to figure out details to make the evaluation process work. An interesting side-benefit of this that we have discovered is that it seems to be “forcing” more detailed sharing of teaching practices among the participating faculty.

Georgia Institute of Technology – Caroline Noyes and Ruth Poproski

We are getting the word out and there is already a general consciousness on campus that the Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) will be devoting this year to reflection. We have been discussing the role of reflection in memory and learning at our book club meetings and have had good attendance so far. The mini-grants are getting ready to roll out and we are looking forward to welcoming new awardees. We are also already planning our retreat in the spring and have located an exciting speaker.

Green River College – Janet Ash and Jeff McCauley

The Green River Reflection Activity Team (RATS) met for a two hour kick off of year two activities. Ten faculty and one classified staff member participated in planning our campus wide CPREE efforts, which include both a study group on reflective practices and classroom activities in the fall quarter involving four departments. Laura Moore-Mueller of our Math division commented that this meeting was the best student focused event she had participated in the entire week. The faculty in this group embraced the opportunity to wrestle with the challenges of incorporating reflection into their classrooms and the new members brought freshness and new perspectives. One of them is a relatively new English teacher that teaches Technical Writing to our engineering students, but also teaches creative writing to the humanities/social science students. She shared some of her reflective classroom practices that utilizes Harry Potter as the catalyst! Another enthusiastic new member is a veteran IT professional with years of industry experience eager to use the field guides he sees as urgently needed for his students.

Highline College – Rich Bankhead

In our opening week event, “Building a Community of Reflective Educators,” we discussed the definition of reflection with 17 faculty in both STEM and non-STEM discipline. Together, we explored why students are sometimes not successful in class, leading to discussion of how we can avoid “telling” our students what it takes to be successful, and instead motivate them towards becoming better students through personal reflection.  We also discussed the use of reflection for culturally responsive teaching, reflection in non-verbal formats, and how reflection can serve our diverse campus community. There was a great deal of interest, to the extent of one of the discussions running overtime!

Our second opening week event, a “birds of a feather” round-table conversation focused on reflective teaching was equally successful. An attending computer science faculty member who was initially unconvinced that reflective activities could be tailored to the needs of his classroom was a great deal more excited by the end by the activities we have planned.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – Patrick Cunningham and Ella Ingram

We started off our activities with a module on reflection presented by Patrick Cunningham at our Summer Teaching Workshop. While it was well received by all participants, one new faculty member in Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) got particularly excited about the use of reflection to help students build meaning. He had spent several years in the industry and saw the significance of helping students understand the importance of course topics and how they connect to people’s lives and even their own lives.

Just the other day, Patrick Cunningham was approached for an informal conversation about reflection by his colleague Richard Onyancha. Richard is involved in global engineering and has been thinking about how to engage students in processing experiences doing engineering in a global context, including traveling abroad, and had thought of speaking to Richard. We were pleased to realize that CPREE at Rose-Hulman is becoming a resource that people think of.

Seattle Central College – Doug Faust

We have been rolling out our mini-grants and preliminary data indicates that is costs about $5 to create and administer a reflective experience for a student.  Everyone seems to be impressed by this number, and if you consider that any given reflection may change a student’s academic trajectory, it is impressive.  You could say that one of our ‘a-ha’ moments is realizing that an experienced educator can choreograph an ‘a-ha’ moment for a student so efficiently.

We have also noticed that the mini-grant system is a very effective way of getting people involved in the project. The PI informally polled some of the educators and they reported that by letting them choose the mode and techniques of the reflective practice, they felt that the project was supportive of their existing teaching instead of disruptive and invasive.

Seattle University – Phil Thompson

At the end of July, we held a workshop for 11 faculty members intended to facilitate the creation of new reflection activities. Using the activity he devised at this workshop, Phillip Thompson conducted a pilot project for the reflection / assessment cycle in August-September. The activity had been designed for students who had engaged in a service-learning trip to a developing country. Three students who visited Thailand from June-August 2015 participated in both the reflection and the assessment. The exercise caused Dr. Thompson to wish he had started these student reflection essays ten years ago when he first began his work with students abroad.

Stanford University – Sheri Sheppard and Helen Chen

One group of educators we are working with is led by the Head TA (leading a group of nine TAs) for the Earth Systems introductory overview course for first and second-year students. Several of these graduate students attended our CPREE workshop in the spring and followed up with us again in the fall. Our initial conversation about where reflection activities might be incorporated into the course eventually led to a broader conversation about articulating course learning outcomes and identifying where and how instructors might envision change in student knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, etc. as a result of taking the course. Several questions came up: How might the product of a reflection activity represent evidence of learning impact? If there were several reflection activities embedded throughout a course, would it be possible map change or growth over time? How do reflection activities inform both individual student self-assessment as well as course or program evaluation?

University of Washington – Ken Yasuhara

One of the early “clients” that we are most excited about is a group of pre-engineering advising staff in the college. They are responsible for ENGR 101, a survey seminar enrolling over 400 students annually that has a format of weekly visiting presenters. We have discussed a wide variety of ways of increasing and enhancing the reflection and active learning components of this course. ENGR 101 is an ideal context for consortium activity, given that most enrollees are first-years and sophomores who are considering but are not necessarily already committed to an engineering major. Similarly, although at a smaller scale, another current client is designing and teaching a first-year seminar for prospective bioengineering majors as part of a university-wide effort to encourage student understanding and development of leadership.

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A review of “Reflection and reflective practice in health professions education: a systematic review”

By: Brook Sattler, PhD, and Lauren Thomas, PhD
CPREE multi-campus coordinators

In this work, Mann, Gordon, and MacLeod (2009) conducted a systematic literature review of the use of reflective practices in health care. The aim of their work “was to understand the key variables influencing this process, identify gaps in the evidence, and to explore any implications” (p. 596). In their initial search, they identified over 600 papers that included the use of the word reflection or related terms. From a paring down process, they then identified 29 papers that explicitly addressed reflective practice in health professional education and practice. In coding these papers, they explored the questions: (1) Do practicing health professionals engage in reflective practice?; (2) What is the nature of students’ reflective thinking?; (3) Can reflective thinking be assessed?; (4) Can reflective thinking be developed?; (5) What contextual influences hinder or enable the development of reflection and reflective capability?; (6) What are the potential positive or negative effects of promoting reflection?

Tips for educators presented in this work:

  • Have discussions about reflection. Discussions about reflective thinking and reflection activities are not a common topic, and often it’s assumed that we are on the same page when we are talking about reflection. The authors encourage more open discussion about these topics.
  • Balance reflection on positive and negative experiences. It’s important for people to look back on and make sense of both positive and negative experiences. While the authors do not connect to The Stanford Resilience project, they do raise a similar point–the importance and role of reflecting on failure, in addition to reflecting on successes.

Questions or challenges presented in this work:

  • See the bigger picture. The authors do a great job of describing the papers and putting them together; however, there is room for synthesis and more information about bigger picture connections.
  • Recognize the different language used to describe reflection. Clearly there is a lot of work going on in health care related to reflection (as seen from the initial pass of identifying 600 papers); however, in culling this corpus down the authors went from 600 to 29. While the scholarship represented in these 600 articles use reflection in some way, many use different language or reflection isn’t the main focus. The findings suggest that there is no common definition of reflection, and the varied terminology and theory is a result of people drawing on different communities. In this systematic literature review, the authors do not normalize the language, so this may contribute to challenges.

Citation

Mann, K., Gordon, J., & MacLeod, A. (2009). Reflection and reflective practice in health professions education: a systematic review. Advances in Health Sciences Education : Theory and Practice, 14(4), 595–621.

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Review of “Getting the measure of reflection: considering matters of definition and depth”

By: Brook Sattler, PhD
CPREE multi-campus coordinator

In this article, Jenny Moon (2007), a prominent UK education development scholar, argues that while higher education and professional development are increasingly aware of the power of reflection, there is not a common definition–“there are considerable differences in the views of educationists on issues of definition” (p. 191). The purpose of her work is (1) to offer a definition of reflection and (2) to provide examples of how to support students in reflection.

In setting up her argument, she argues that a lack of community accepted definition for reflection can lead to challenges in telling/showing students how to reflect and explaining to students what reflection should look like. These challenges then result in superficial and descriptive reflection. So while reflection can be extremely powerful, it falls short when it is only superficial and descriptive.

In defining “reflection,” she defines a number of associated terms:”‘reflection’ and ‘reflective learning’ seem to be words that describe an internal process in contrast to ‘reflective writing’, which is a representation of reflection, but, like any other form of representation, it is not a direct representation of the internal process” (p. 192). She goes on to define “reflective practice” as a “broader process in which there is a habit of reflecting” (p. 192). She says that much of the differences in defining reflection comes from scholars focus on outcomes of reflection, rather than the process of reflection. In making this argument, she summarizes  the outcomes of reflection:

  • “learning, knowledge and understanding
  • some form of action
  • a process of critical review
  • personal and continuing professional development
  • reflection on the process of learning or personal
    functioning (metacognition)
  • the building of theory from observations in
    practice situations
  • the making of decisions/resolution of uncertainty,
    the solving of problems; empowerment
    and emancipation
  • unexpected outcomes (e.g., images, ideas that
    could be solutions to dilemmas or seen as creative
    activity)
  • emotion (that can be an outcome or can be
    part of the process)
  • clarification and the recognition that there is
    a need for further reflection and so on” (p. 193).

In concluding, Moon offers resources that are structures for guiding the process of reflection. Specifically, she says that educators need to start with scaffolding or providing strong “props” to support reflection but then should soon after dispense with the “props” (p. 194). The goal in scaffolding reflection and then challenging students by removing the scaffolding is to engage them in depth reflection–reflection that moves beyond the superficial and descriptive. She then offers educators “The Worrying Tutorial” that is a series of reflection examples to demonstrate to learners the various levels of reflection. “It was to address the difficulty both of helping learners to start with reflection and then—at a later stage—to deepen their reflection” (p. 194). “The Worrying Tutorial” is to be used with the “Framework for Reflective Writing,” which provides descriptions of the four levels of reflection. Coupled together these two provide powerful tools to help students begin reflecting and deepen their reflection.

Citations

Moon, J. (2007). Getting the measure of reflection: considering matters of definition and depth, Journal of Radiotherapy and Practice, 6(4), 191-200.

 

resource

Review of “The Power of Experiential Education”

By: Brook Sattler, PhD, CPREE multi-campus coordinator

In the article–“The Power of Experiential Education”–Janet Eyler (2009), a prominent scholar in experiential education, argues that one challenge of liberal education is preparing students to transfer learning to new context. She claims that in traditional education students spend significant time learning content from a book or from an education . For example through co-ops, internships, and service learning, students apply theory to practice and gain real experience.

While she boasts the value of experiential education, she emphasizes that students gain more out of the experience when there is purposeful reflection. In the her guidelines for creating high-quality experiential programs, she calls out reflection as one of the most important–

“The most critical factor for achieving powerful learning outcomes from experiential-learning programs is the inclusion of opportunities for feedback and reflection. Challenging, continuous, context-appropriate reflection turns work experience into learning experience. It is easy to underestimate how intensive reflection must be in order for it to have an impact; it is not unusual to find faculty members who believe their program provides adequate reflection even though the effects on students fall short” (p. 30).

In concluding this call for more purposeful and “intense” reflection in higher education, she offers implications for a variety of people:

  • Use Kolb’s reflection cycle
  • Carefully plan and embedded reflection into your teaching
  • “departments need to take ownership by placing faculty in charge of formulating goals for experiential education and facilitating internship seminars and service-learning classes” (p. 31)
  • …and many more

Overall, this article provides good argumentation about foundational reasoning for experiential education and how to even further improve experiential education through “continuous, well-structured reflection opportunities to help students link experience and learning throughout the course of their placements” (p. 30). In this theory this practice of purposefully and continuously supporting students reflection sounds ideal, it is important to remember a previous review about the reflection “structure trap” in service learning. This dissertation work suggests that so structured and rigid reflection interferes the already organic reflection, causing a feeling of fake or invaluable reflection.

Citations

Boswell, L. (2010). The Structure Trap. Students’ Perceptions of Reflection on a Co-curricular Immersion Service-Learning Trip.   (Doctoral dissertation). Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA.

Eyler, J. (2009). The Power of Experiential Education, Liberal Education, 24-31.

activity, general, news, practices

Sharing the First Year of CPREE

At CPREE, we have just wrapped up our first year of activity on the 12 partner campuses. Over 100 educators from across the country participated in our mapping of reflection activities. Educators shared the many creative ways that they prompt students to reflect and our core team has captured those activities to create over 120 field guide entries. Along with capturing these activities, each campus hosted two or more events to engage educators, and sometimes students, in activities to further understand and promote reflection. With so many educators, activities, and events, it is difficult to highlight just one story from our first year. In this post, we wanted to share a brief story from each of our twelve campuses about their first year in CPREE. Our team is excited as we are well on our way to making a notable and long-lasting change in engineering education across the country.

 

Arizona State University – Polytechnic Campus –Kristy Csavina and Adam Carberry

While attending the 2015 Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Adam Carberry ran into the Senior Dean of Student and Academic Affairs at ASU, Dr. James Collofello. Dr. Collofello had attended the symposium based on a previous conversation with Adam. During a session run by the UW CPREE PIs it was noted that ASU was a participating institution and that Dr. Carberry was one of the ASU PIs. Dr. Collofello was sitting next to Adam and immediately suggested that they meet upon returning to ASU because he would like to leverage his office, the introduction to engineering course, and the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Program to help expand the ASU CPREE efforts.

Bellevue College – Frank Lee

At Bellevue, the interview process itself was a great experience for all involved. We had a chance to take the time to reflect on our teaching and are looking forward to sharing the collection of field guides with campus faculty. We’re definitely anticipating a strong response from interested faculty based on those who joined our team after participating in campus events. The college’s Teaching Strategies Discussion Group leader allowed CPREE to present at a group meeting; during the meeting, the leader gradually became more and more enthusiastic about how integral reflection is part of the learning process.

California Polytechnic Institute and State University – Trevor Harding

From our discussion group there have been a number of aha moments for participants.  For some this has focused on what the conditions are for effective reflection.  Some of these conditions include the need that students believe in the value of reflection before they reflect, the time to reflect, safe conditions in which to share your reflection product, and so on.  Other faculty were thinking about what is appropriate to ask students to reflect on, and how safe will they feel if we ask them to reflect on something deeply personal.  Some faculty noticed that they had been thinking about reflection only for enhancement of learning effectiveness and had never considered that reflection could be used as a way to promote transformation in the lives of students more holistically.  Still others had noticed that they felt they were taking a risk in asking students to reflect on their experiences in a class because the students might turn it into an evaluation of the instructor.

 

Clarkson University- John Moosbrugger

A colleague, Charles Robinson approached me, unsolicited, about activities in his course BR200 Introduction to Biomedical and Rehabilitation Engineering, Science and Technology. He wanted to include a question or two on a course feedback “survey” that would be useful to the project (CPREE project). He just became interested because of press releases about the project and announcements for the Brown Bag Lunches. I have his summarized student responses, and I may be able to make some use of them. What was gratifying to me was his enthusiasm to do something without being solicited.

 Georgia Institute of Technology – Caroline Noyes and Ruth Poproski

Of particular note, the faculty who are meeting weekly to discuss teaching and learning in large classes were able to come up with many ideas of how to implement reflection for learning in their large classes, ranging from 60 to 300 students.  Again, the quick and enthusiastic buy-in was surprising to us, given our sense of resistance in the past.  The main take-away from this is that the provision of evidence from the research in addition to examples of reflection activities that will be provided from the field guides generated by the consortium will go a long way in terms of getting faculty to understand and embrace the import and feasibility of using reflection to enhance learning, even in large classes.

Green River College – Janet Ash and Jeff McCauley

The CPREE project has made a notable mark in how we look at reflection within the many engineering classes that we teach and the benefits to students when reflection is present in the classroom. In the mechanics of materials and differential equations courses, it appears there was a notable increase in meaningful reflection and critical thinking by the students as the problems become more open-ended and more theoretically difficult. In a computer science course, an educator uses a survey; one question presents a list of potential reading strategies for students to consider as they prepare for class each week. As the students review this list weekly, they are reminded of how their own reading abilities can be improved and they were reading more successfully as the quarter progressed. A mathematics educator shared their post-quiz reflection with us for the field guide and two of us adopted that activity in our own classes. We were all delighted to see the activity helped students in all three, very different classes to improve their performance overall.

Highline College – Rich Bankhead

We use a reflective activity in our ENGR 100 class in which students design their own process for becoming a world-class engineering student. Reading the assignments at the end of the quarter is always refreshing. For example, a student wrote, “Engineering is a demanding field and this class has delineated what it will take to meet these demands…I can look back over each week’s exercises and assignments and see so much preparatory action and relevancy for years to come.” Another student wrote, “Understanding the different learning styles and how they applied gave me a better grasp on how I learn and what I need to do to be successful in the future. For example, I learned that I have a preference for reflective learning…”

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – Patrick Cunningham and Ella Ingram

We have a Rose-Hulman affiliated design and development firm, Rose-Hulman Ventures, that hires our students part-time during the school year and full-time over the summer to work on industry sponsored projects. Projects are led by full-time project managers and students work together on teams. I (Patrick Cunningham) met with Elizabeth Hagerman, Vice President of Rose-Hulman Ventures, in the fall to discuss role of reflection in student work experiences. At this point, it seems reflections are primarily informal and likely driven by the project managers. She invited me back to present about CPREE at a staff meeting with project managers to find out more from them and see what participation might develop from there. I will be visiting a staff meeting in January.

Seattle Central College – Doug Faust

Our group facilitator brought up the very interesting point that faculty choices of reflection activities may be informed by their own teaching goals and values. We look forward to investigating these connections during the campus-wide events and using this as a way to open dialogues with faculty about their teaching practice. In later discussions, the idea of grading reflective practices came up again and again. Fundamentally, faculty seem to understand and fear that students may not genuinely engage in reflection if it’s being graded. For example, the boiler-plate response “I need to study harder” written on exam reflections is coming from a place of wanting to satisfy a grader and not a genuine reflection. We’d would like to explore this more because it seems quite key in instructional design.

Seattle University – Phil Thompson

Through our two on campus events, we have been able to connect over 20% of our science and engineering faculty to the CPREE project. We were able to share reflection activities, and spend valuable time discussing teaching with each other. The two events helped ensure our group of 16 educators to participate in our year 2 efforts. On July 21 and July 28 we held what turned out to be two very inspiring and motivational workshops on reflection. A group of 11 faculty developed new reflective activities for their courses. We also began developing assessment tools for each of these activities and are looking forward to implementing these activities in the fall.

Stanford University – Sheri Sheppard and Helen Chen

In each interview that we will do, we will try to find this one element that we find important in reflection, which is change.  We feel that it’s not enough to tell students to “go and reflect”, instead they need help with connecting their experiences to the course material, with challenging their beliefs and assumptions, and in deepening their learning.  How do we not rely on student’s testimonials and self-reports to assess the quality of their learning –because the challenge is that self–reporting will lead to confusion between student satisfaction and student learning.  Is there a measure that allows students to show us, rather than tell us, that they have attained greater understanding, that they have ability to apply their knowledge, and problem solving skills?

University of Washington – Ken Yasuhara

One of my initial (non-interview) meetings was with Sonya Cunningham, a staffer who runs a CoE program specifically designed to prepare financial aid-eligible freshman for majoring in engineering. Allowing myself to forgo rushing into an interview about a specific reflection activity freed me to talk with Sonya about the program and its recent history of major design changes. I learned that Sonya already incorporates reflection in numerous ways but was interested in streamlining her process, which we agreed to meet again to discuss. At the end of our hour-long discussion, she agreed to send me some of her program materials to inform my choice of a reflection activity to focus a mapping interview on when we next met. Perhaps more valuable to me than meeting the CPREE objectives of the meeting, however, was hearing about all of the thoughtful pedagogy and heartfelt energy that Sonya puts into this program. As I remarked on multiple occasions, she was remarkably well-informed about pedagogy, program design, diversity, and persistence issues. Our conversation left me so inspired and hopeful that I decided to drop a line to the associate dean whom she reports to. I have no illusions of being a power broker but know that good work too often goes unrecognized and unrewarded, and I figured it couldn’t hurt CoE’s chances of retaining Sonya or Sonya’s chances of career advancement. I count it as a good sign that the word I put in quickly made it back to Sonya, who thanked me many times.

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Reflecting on failure

By: Brook Sattler, PhD, CPREE multi-campus coordinator

Reflection can be characterized as learning from the past, even thinking about the past in service of the future (Turns, et al., 2014). At The Stanford Resilience Project they are supporting students in learning from their failures.

It is an effort to normalize setbacks and help students reflect on and learn from their failures. The underlying assumption of the resilience project is that learning through reflecting on setbacks is a key to student success. The Resilience Project’s core ideas are: (1) learn about learning, (2) seek advice, (3) get perspective, and (4) connect with community. The purpose of this type of reflection is to develop resilience through learning and growing from failure.

Citations

The Stanford Resilience Project

resource

Resource: “A successful strategy to get college students thinking critically”

By: Brook Sattler, PhD, CPREE multi-campus coordinator

In an effort to support first-year physics students’ critical thinking, scholars engaged students in working through experiments in a lab and then comparing their experiment to other answers. “By applying some statistics they were gradually learning, they grappled with why their comparisons came out the way they did” (Johnson, 2015). Through reflecting on their own answers and comparing those answers to other experiments, students considered why they were different, where their thought process deviated, etc. This reflection opportunity led to critical thinking.

In implementing this pedagogical approach, the educators wanted to foster scientific thinking. In the end, this approach of  reflecting and refining their lab skills had beneficial effects, even lasting at least a year past intervention.

Citations/Resources

Johnson, S. K. (2015). A successful strategy to get college students to think critically. In ars technica.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/august/thinking-holmes-wieman-081715.html

resource

A review of “Conceptualising learning from experience: Developing a model for facilitation”

By: Brook Sattler, PhD
CPREE multi-campus coordinator

In this work, David Boud (1994) offers  a model for supporting students in learning from their experiences. To start, he places particular emphasis on adult learning and learning from experiences versus learning from educators who are the authority figures. This argument lays the groundwork for the importance of supporting students in learning from their experience.

He then provides a quick summary of previous literature on learning from experience (e.g., Schön, Kolb, Jarvis, and Heron) and how it connects to his work, but most importantly the shortcomings of these works: “None of these authors have sufficiently addressed the needs of those confronted with the typically context-specific and personally-embedded learning which characterises the tasks which adults face” (p. 49).

Then he proposes a model for promoting learning from experience that is based two two assumptions: (1) “learning is always rooted in prior experience and that any attempt to promote new learning must in some way take account of that experience” (p. 50) and (2) “the process of learning from experience is necessarily an active one which involves learners in engaging with and intervening in the events of which they are part” (p. 50).

The model focuses on three parts: prior to the event (preparation); during the event (the experience); and following the event (the reflective process). While all of these parts are important in their own right, he pays particular attention to the last one: following the event or the reflective process. In dissecting this part of the model, he emphasizes that reflection includes emotions and feelings and has three parts: return to the experience, attending to feelings, and re-evaluation of the experience. The purpose of returning to the experience is for the individual  to mentally revisit and vividly portray the experience–remember what happened. The purpose of attending to feelings is that it can either inhibit or enhance further reflection (e.g., negative emotions may cause a person to focus only on the negative and inhibit their ability to learn from the experience). Finally, in re-evaluating the experience, Boud (1994) says that there are four aspects of the process: “association—relating new information to that which is already known; integration—seeking relationships between new and old information; validation—determining the authenticity for the learner of the ideas and feelings which have resulted; and appropriation—making knowledge one’s own, a part of one’s normal ways of operating” (p. 52).

Overall, Boud’s work offers another perspective when thinking about how to support students in learning from their experience. On the surface, the model may seem a little complex, but it is those intricate details that Boud starts to tease apart important aspects of reflection, supporting students in reflection, and ultimately in supporting students in learning from their own experience.

Citation

Boud, D. (1994). Conceptualising learning from experience: Developing a model for facilitation. Published in Proceedings of the 35th Adult Education Research Conference, 20-22 May 1994, Knoxville, Tennessee: College of Education, University of Tennessee, 49-54.