Digitizing Reflection
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Source of image: https://medium.com
As I perused the reading materials for Module 3 of my course, it became very clear to me that I was entering brand new reflective writing territory. This is because even though I had been engaging my students in reflective writing for several years, I had done so only in a face-to-face setting. My state of mind reflected the image above; a sort of venturing into the unknown. I teach a writing course and realistically, it should be easy to think about my students writing reflectively about concepts they had learned and how learning these concepts helped them to improve their writing. Simple. It would certainly seem that way but as I read I realized there were more many more options I could use for engagement. In an article by Kurunanayaka, Naidu, Rajendra and Ratnayake (2017), the writers reported on research they had conducted on using open educational resources (OERs) to engage students in reflection. Students commented on how using online discussion forums enhanced their ability to think critically and to own their learning.
I reflected on that for a while and contemplated the possibility of using discussion forums in my own context. I wondered: would this activity engage my students more effectively since it involved the use of technology? Would they be more enthusiastic if they had to interact with each other in an online learning environment? My previous, informal surveys ahd gleaned that most students felt that writing reflections was a like a chore they completed only to get a grade. Deep down, my main goal in assigning reflections had always been to see how much they had learned about specific concepts.
Digging Deeper
In the same article by Karunanayaka et al. mention was made of Moon (1995; 2005) who had described reflection as a "mental process" in which we think "about what we have done, learned and experienced, which is used to fulfil a purpose or to achieve some anticipated outcome" (cited in Karunanayaka et al., p. 144). My goal in assigning reflective writing had always been to get students to think about what they had learned in order to apply the lesson(s) to their studies in their majors and/or to life after university. I decided to dig a little deeper into Moon's beliefs and was able to find the following, very enlightening video.
Professor Moon's concept that "reflection lies somewhere around the notion of learning" (Moon, 2001) was fascinating to me, especially when she mentioned the "stages of learning" which she identified as: 1) noticing, 2) making sense, 3) making meaning, 4) working with meaning, and 5) transformative learning. This reminded me of Bloom's Taxonomy of higher level and lower level thinking skills and I was also able to relate the stages to the DIEP reflective model that my students are required to use in writing their reflections. DIEP is an acronym for describe, interpret, evaluate and plan. In Moon's stages of learning, noticing and making sense would overlap with describe; making meaning would be the stage at which students interpret their experience/learning; working with meaning would be where they evaluate their learning, making relevant connections to similar experiences elsewhere; and, transformative learning would be the stage at which they plan how they are going to make use of those experiences, going forward. Moon pointed out that it is important for learners to be able to describe and articulate the experience but they also must critically anlyse the experiences to determine the impact on them and how they can use them to change and develop.
All this has certainly provided me with much food for thought as I navigate the new directions in which the course and the reading materials are taking me.
References
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