Develop academic reflection skills

Reflection means analysing your own experiences to improve the way you learn or work. It's a valuable skill that can help learners and professionals gain experience, confidence and self-awareness.

Reflection: in an academic setting

Reflection involves learners thinking about:

what they're learning
the implications of theories, concepts or ideas

Reflective practice: in a professional setting

Reflection is often more to do with analysing individual incidents.

Practitioners will:

consider what they've done in a certain situation
identify what they might do better next time

Group reflection

Often, group reflection is more useful than individual reflection.

Group reflection (involving as many people as possible) is more likely to generate creative solutions to problems.

If shortcomings in a system cause an incident, one person is unlikely to be able to fix this with individual reflection.

How to design your course activities

Decide why you want learners to reflect and what the process will be.

If you expect the approach to be theoretical and analytical, ensure you provide opportunities for learners to reflect on their learning.

You could ask your learners questions like:

what does this concept or theory mean to you?
how does it relate to your interpretation of the course text or topic?
how could you use this concept or theory to further your understanding of the course text or topic?

Learners will benefit from working in small groups.

Get learners to analyse their own actions

You could ask learners to reflect on how they responded to something in the past.

If possible, provide an example of how they could structure and write up their reflections.

You could also upload questions as prompts, for example:

what was the setting and background?
what happened?
what did you do?
what was the impact of your actions?
what would you do differently next time and why?
do you need to learn anything new (knowledge, skills or approaches)?

You could structure group reflection in a similar way.

Follow up by letting groups and individuals share and comment on each others’ reflective texts.