Self-Reflection in the Learning Process
In an engaged classroom of invested learners, learning is not a top-down process. Students learn from their teacher and from each other. Teachers learn from the students. Opportunities for self-reflection encourage reciprocal learning, allowing students to take ownership of their experience and stay connected to their personal goals for the class. It can also provide students with a foundation for critically assessing their own progress and identifying classroom successes and challenges for themselves.
Offering opportunities for self-reflection allows students to integrate education into their personal lives and to claim what they have gained through the classroom experience. It may also reframe what success means for students and program administrators.
Self-reflection embodies a deeper sense of learning, beyond the acquisition of facts.
- Individual Self-reflection
- Acknowledges and values participants’ life experience and provides a way to integrate that experience into classroom learning
- Creates a space where students can generate knowledge by themselves and for themselves.
- Provides students with pathways to participate in more formal learning assessments.
- Shared Self-reflection
- Provides opportunities to adjust for changing needs of the class—offering a mechanism for adapting the classroom environment and students’ participation for continued success.
- Allows students and teachers to collaborate and exercise creativity in method and approach.
- Reveals how students are impacting the course and how the course has affected student lives.
- Self-Reflective Assessment
- Provides consistent language from individual and shared self-reflection to offer markers of growth and development
- Allows students to participate in the assessment, reaffirming agency and authorship
- Creates the space for students to articulate the shared objectives of the assignment or course through their work
“After attending the Odyssey Project, I felt empowered, and I knew I had a voice. It is a voice I used in 2006 when I wrote an editorial published in the Wisconsin State Journal entitled ‘Education Must Trump Prison Time.’ It is a voice I actively use today on the [University of Wisconsin] Board of Regents as I work to increase access to education. None of this would have been possible if it were not for the Odyssey Project, giving me not only the skills to use my voice but also the confidence.”
– Corey Saffold, UW Odyssey Project Graduate and Regent in the University of Wisconsin System
Guiding Principles
Principle 1: Use Journaling/Free Writing for Reflection
The terms journaling and freewriting refer to prompted and unprompted informal writing linked to course goals. Students may write about classroom or assignment experiences, connections, or personal goals. What’s essential is that the writing is informal, usually ungraded, designed to allow students a chance to collect and explore their thoughts. When introducing freewriting or journal exercises, it is important to relay clear introductions regarding the purpose of journaling, expected format, writing topics, how much writing is required, whether the writing will be shared or read by anyone else, and how it will be responded to or evaluated.
Principle 2: Include Reflective Assignments in the Curriculum
Returning to an earlier assignment can be a useful exercise in writing and an opportunity for students to recognize their growth. A reflective assignment at a pivotal point in the course allows students to recall the amount of reading, thought, and writing completed. This reflection asks students to identify the arc of the course, who they are as a community, and who they are as an individual contributing to this discourse. Reflections can be distributed to the next cohort of students as a way of introduction to the course and a connection to those who came before. Practice 1: Letters to Themselves, provides three variations on reflective letter writing assignments.
Principle 3: Make Time to Reflect on the Course
Reflection can be key to effectively wrapping up a course. This gives students the opportunity to reflect on individual progress and experience. Key elements include:
- Reflecting on learning and growth during the course
- Hearing all student voices (if in group)
- Identifying and celebrating successes
- Considering what’s next and identifying how what has been learned in class may be applied in real world situations.
Practice 2: Guided Questions provide examples of how to encourage students to reflect on their processing, rather than on a final product or grade.
Anecdote: Free Writing
We had students do short freewrites just before the break specifically to help them reflect upon what had come up for them in the first half of the class. Sometimes the free writes were directed in order to build towards a writing assignment and sometimes they weren’t. During the break students would often talk to each other about what they had written and then those conversations would bridge into the second half of class.
Practices
Practice 1: Letters to Themselves
Option A
At the beginning of the class, ask students to write a letter to themselves describing their personal and academic goals and objectives. These letters can be revisited periodically through the course to reflect, revise, and describe new expectations, and can be paired with selected texts from the likes of Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Helen Keller focusing on education.
Option B
During orientation, pose the following questions for the new cohort:
- What do I want from this course? What do I bring to this course?
- What are the humanities? What do the humanities mean to me? (Adapt for your subject matter.)
- What does it mean to be an intellectual?
Talk through these questions, with a discussion about keywords and concepts that can bring clarity to the course itself, as well as giving a glimpse into the wealth of knowledge in the room (decentering faculty as the only resource for learning and support early on).
After the discussion: each student writes a letter to themselves in response to these questions, drawing on the shared knowledge of the group. This letter offers a place for self-reflection and individual goal setting. Letters are collected by the teacher and returned at the end of the course for further reflection.
Option C
Another approach to using letters is to offer the opportunity to write one at the end of the term to be delivered to them one year later. (This requires a faculty member or administrator who will hold the letters, not open them, and then place them in the mail to students at a later date.) Supplied with envelopes and stamps, students can write to their future selves about what they want to remember from their experience and what they hope for themselves in the year to come. Inevitably, students forget that they wrote the letter and receiving it in their mailbox is a surprise and a treat.
Practice 2: Guided Questions in Response to Writing Assignments
These questions have been assigned after many writing assignments, both low stakes and formal. Offering these reflective prompts consistently throughout the semester may encourage students to think more deeply about the choices they made in the essay, not only developing their writing but developing the ability to reflect and know their own process.
- Identify and describe your strengths in this writing process. This can be any moment from brainstorming while taking a walk to structuring an argument, to revising a thesis statement. Consider what made this part of your process so productive and rewarding.
- Identify and describe your challenges in this writing process. This can be anything from organization to the topic sentence in paragraph three. Consider why this part of your process was an obstacle.
- Where would you spend more time if given a longer timeline? Remember, the goal for our writing process is not “perfection,” and recognizing where we could continue to improve is an important skill. Point to a moment where you would spend more time revising and explain why.