I am teaching a First-Year Seminar this fall, and a major component of my approach is teaching students to be reflective about their learning. It is easy for them to go through the motions of assignments and campus experiences without being thoughtful about the real/potential impact on their learning and growth. So, I am using both weekly reflection assignments for a general consideration of their learning in this class and others, and reflection pieces in each assignment.
To do this, I have adopted the lightweight “What? So What? Now What?” model. There are other models that are probably better for service-learning (the DEAL model) and internships (Gibbs), but the “What” model is easy to understand and apply to any situation.
What?
This stage focuses on describing what happened. That might mean recounting a campus experience, describing a particular idea from a reading, a classroom conversation, etc. The focus here is on the details of what happened, trying to get to the specifics that matter. This is a good opportunity to help students learn to convey enough meaningful detail to make their point, to practice the skills of sifting and spotlighting.
So What?
In this stage, students analyze and make sense out of the experience. This is where they might make a connection between a reading, what someone said in class, and an experience in their biology class. Or note how a campus experience impacted their feeling of community or belonging. Or what new skill they developed or practiced, and its outcome. This is the core of reflection, so I often give them some guiding prompts to help frame the analysis process. See this page for examples of questions you might ask to prompt this stage in certain contexts.
Now What?
Personally, I like this stage the best, since it prompts students to take action. Students might identify knowledge/skills they need to develop, consider what their next steps are going to be, or how they will apply this knowledge in future situations. This section teaches the students how to ensure learning can have a concrete impact on their lives, locking in those benefits in real ways. A student in my class demonstrated this stage wonderfully when he reflected on his “campus scavenger hunt” visit to the Walter Center for Career Achievement: He realized that since his own major started recruiting at the end of his sophomore year, he needed to start building a leadership resume now, and he planned another visit to the Center to start identifying the best opportunities, such as clubs to join and how to start documenting these experiences.
This model can be used in more robust, structured ways, but I find it is a great entry point for students to learn the basic skills of reflection. And if we start training them to reflect early on, they will have a good start for their later experiential learning opportunities.
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