May 1, 2014

Cultivating the habit of reflection

Jennifer Turns: Promoting student reflection to deepen learning and self-awareness

When students reflect on their academic learning and its relationship to their personal and professional goals, they gain a deeper understanding of the course material, as well as a better sense of who they are and where they’re going.^1,2,3 They also gain a valuable skill. Employers want to hire people who are self-aware, who know what they know and what they don’t; and graduate admissions committees notice candidates who can share a clear narrative linking their experiences to their future ambitions. Reflection exercises can also benefit faculty. For example, they can use student feedback to fine-tune their teaching. Reflection techniques such as those used by Mary Jennifer Turns can be integrated into courses in any discipline, providing major benefits for students without major investments of faculty time.

Jennifer Turns asks students in every course and nearly every class session to reflect on how the material they’re learning in class relates to their future work. “The one thing you can count on in education is that students will have challenging experiences they will need to reflect on,” says Turns, who co-directs the new Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education at UW Seattle. “Simply asking, ‘What did you learn from doing this?’ can be powerful.” She adds,“Student responses remind me of issues I had forgotten about and I get ideas from their ideas. I get inspired by my students.” Here are some of her basic principles on reflection, which are applicable for classes in any topic:

Help students reflect through dialogue: Taking just a few minutes to ask a student some personalized questions can be very effective. Turns says, “If a student has been an officer in an organization, the mentor might ask the student, ‘How has being a leader prepared you to be a better learner?’ If the student ventures, ‘Time management?’, then the mentor can say, ‘Time management is a really important skill for learning,’ and then help the student go deeper, perhaps to talk about becoming more tolerant of ambiguity or a little less deferential to authority.” The consortium outlines this process for engineering students in a diagram that can be modified for other disciplines.

Stress that a portfolio is an argument, not an archive: “A portfolio is not a transcript; it’s not a place to recount every experience,” says Turns. “A portfolio is a place to make an argument, where the student says, ‘Of all the things I could tell you, I want to tell you five things: three arguments that are going to make you think that I’m well-prepared to be an X (insert profession of choice) and two that will make you see me as distinctive.’”

Incorporate reflection exercises that are valuable, but don’t take up too much time:

• Choose short, easy activities: Reflection “Mad Libs” take only five minutes at the end of a class session. Students fill in the blanks of a basic question: “From engaging in [experience/activity], I gained [the takeaway], which prepared me for [the future].” Turns leaves the definition of ‘future’ open. “Sometimes their future is the next class, sometimes it’s their current job, or a future career.” She may ask students to draw, rather than write, their responses. “It’s amazing some of the images they can come up with in just five minutes,” she says.
• Create activities that are easy to evaluate: To make an assignment for PechaKucha talks (twenty slides in under seven minutes) more time-efficient, Turns had students post the talks for viewing online so the class didn’t have to sit through them live; and she developed straightforward grading criteria. “I told students if their voice-over sounded professional and their talk included the required components, they’d get an ‘A’. This freed them to focus on the topic of the talk—how this class connected to their future.”

 

 
Resources: Turns described her taxonomy of micro-reflection, meso-reflection, and macro-reflection in page 8 of the April 2013 Provost report Putting Learning First: How Students Learn and How Technology Can Help, from the 2012–2013 series on teaching and learning with technology. A detailed description of research into the benefits of reflection through portfolios is available in: Jennifer Turns, Brook Sattler, Matt Eliot, Deborah Kilgore, and Kathryn Mobrand, “Preparedness Portfolios and Portfolio Studios,” International Journal of ePortfolio 2, no. 1 (2012): 1–13.

¹ Beyer, Catherine Hoffman, Gerald Gillmore, and Andrew Fisher. Inside the Undergraduate Experience: The University of Washington’s Study of Undergraduate Learning. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2007.
²Atman, Cynthia J., Sheri D. Sheppard, Jennifer Turns, Robin S. Adams, Lorraine N. Fleming, Reed Stevens, Ruth A. Streveler, Karl A. Smith, Ronald L. Miller, Larry J. Leifer, Ken Yasuhara, and Dennis Lund. Enabling Engineering Student Success: The Final Report for the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2010. http://www.engr.washington.edu/caee/CAEE%20final%20report%2020101102.pdf.
³Thompson, Leanne J., Gordon Clark, Marion Walker, and J. Duncan Whyatt. “‘It’s Just Like an Extra String to Your Bow’: Exploring Higher Education Students’ Perceptions and Experiences of Extracurricular Activity and Employability.” Active Learning in Higher Education 14, no. 2 (July 2013): 135–147. doi:10.1177/1469787413481129.

Learn More

Read the full Provost report on how to prepare students for life after graduation.