Storyboard

Reflecting on learning is one of the most powerful tools available to educators (National Research Council 1999). Storyboard advocates for integrating reflective practices throughout students' experiences, which leads to deeper learning, richer connections among course work in different disciplines, life experiences, and more intentional personal and professional goals (Yancey 1998, Yancey 2016). 

Reflective practices directly impact learning. The use of reflection within and across contexts helps learner engage with new material and discover connections across the experiences they encounter in college. Deep, deliberate, and ongoing reflection offers students the opportunity to interrogate their own learning and integrate various aspects of their personal and professional lives. The power of reflection, or meta-cognition, has been recognized as a powerful tool for learning by researchers from a variety of fields (see How People Learn). 

There are many activities that can be adapted to facilitate student reflection. We highlight a few here from Kimberly Tanner's "Promoting Student Metacognition," but we also encourage you to explore additional ideas found in the links at the bottom of this section. 

Pre-assessment: Pre-assessment questions, whether students address them individually or in teams, verbally or in writing, help students identify what they know and what they need to know. Students can be asked variations on: What do I already know about ___? How will that help me learn ____?

Muddiest Point: This is an in-process activity, which helps students monitor and reflect on their learning as it is occurring. A "muddiest point" can take the form of a quick written response at the end of class, asking students to identify the one most confusing aspect of class that day. 

Thinking Like a ____: In a book for middle school language arts teachers called In the Middle, Nancie Atwell discusses "taking the lid off my head." Faculty can model expert thinking by doing a think-aloud session and "taking the lid off." With this approach, a faculty member demonstrates to students how an expert (ie., the faculty member) establishes a research project, initiates a grant, works with a difficult reading, or engages with whatever the task at hand is. Students can be asked to identify one or two strategies that an expert uses that they would like to experiment with. 

Reflective Notebook: An ongoing reflective notebook, integrated into a course grade, gives students the opportunity to record their thinking over time -- and then to reflect on what they've learned and where they've struggled. 

Additional teaching strategies:

Creating Critical Reflection Assignments (University of Puget Sound)

Reflection Framework and Prompts (University of Waterloo)

Facilitating Reflection: A Manual (University of Vermont)

There are many excellent readings on reflection, and we have provided more of them in the research box, below. Here, we list a few pieces that are essential reading for faculty beginning to think about what reflection is, why it matters, and how to incorporate it into their courses.

Beaufort, Anne. "Reflection: The Metacognitive Move Towards Transfer of Learning." in Kathleen Blake Yancey (ed). A Rhetoric of Reflection. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2016. p. 23-41. Beaufort's chapter provides an analysis of the connections between reflection and learning transfer, or the ways in which learners apply knowledge from one context into the next. 

National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Research Council 1999. This groundbreaking book synthesizes many strands of educational research. It identifies metacognition as an especially powerful tool for promoting learning transfer, noting that "Transfer can be improved by helping students become more aware of themselves as learners who actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tests and performances" (67). 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake (ed). A Rhetoric of Reflection. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2016. This recent collection includes scholarship on reflection within and beyond the writing classroom. Yancey's earlier work, Reflection in the Writing Classroom, offers pedagogical strategies for facilitating student reflection. Her scholarship on e-portfolios, including Electronic Portfolios 2.0 (with Darren Cambridge and Barbara Cambridge), includes findings on integrative and reflective practices from across the curriculum.

Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Generating, deepening, and documenting learning: The power of critical reflection in applied learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1(1), 25-48.

Ash, S. L., & Clayton, P. H. (2004). The articulated learning: An approach to guided reflection and assessment. Innovative Higher Education, 29(2), 137-154. In this article, Ash and Clayton describe a reflection model that can be used throughout a course to engage students in deeper, more thoughtful reflection. 

​Jayatilleke, Nishamali and Anne Mackie. "Reflection as part of continuous professional development for public health professionals: a literature review" Journal of Public Health, 35(2) 308–312.

Larsen, Douglas; London, Daniel; Emke, Amanda. "Using Reflection to Influence Practice: Students' Perceptions of Daily Reflection in Clinical Education." Perspectives on Medical Education. Oct 2016 5(5), 285-291. This article investigates the positive impact on student learning when daily reflection was added to clinical experience. 

Mann, Karen. "Reflection's Role in Learning: Increasing Engagement and Deepening Participation" Perspectives on Medical Education. October 2016 5(5). 259-261. In this article, Mann describes the state of research on reflection within medical education. She argues that the role of reflection has moved from a periphery practice to a central one as the field has  recognized its impact on learning. 

Sanders, M. and J. McClellan. Studying Communication: An Invitation to Intentional Learning. Hayden-MacNeil. (in press). In a text geared toward undergraduate communication majors, Sanders and McClellan offer strategies for students to think through their degree's purpose and applications. 

Taczak, Kara. (2015). "Reflection is Critical for Writers' Development" in Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (Eds), Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (78-79). Utah State UP. This brief definitional piece is applicable to any new learning contexts. Taczak notes, "Reflection allows writers to recall, reframe, and relocate knowledge and practices; therefore, it must be worked at in order to be most effectively learned and practiced" (79).

Tanner, Kimberly. (2012). "Promoting Student Metacognition." Life Sciences Education 11(2). online. Tanner offers a brief (and rich) definition of the role and purpose of metacognition. Then, she explores several practical pedagogical strategies for enhancing reflection in Biology, each of which can be easily adapted to other disciplines.

Tinberg, Howard. (2012). "Metacognition is Not Cognition." in Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle  (Eds), Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (75-76). Utah State UP. This brief definitional piece is applicable to any new learning contexts. As Tinberg explains, "while cognition remains critical to effective writing, it is metacognition that endows writers with a certain control over their work, regardless of the situation in which they operate" (76). 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2016). “Introduction: Contextualizing Reflection” in Kathleen Blake Yancey (Ed). A Rhetoric of Reflection (3-20). Boulder, CO: Utah State UP. This chapter offers a useful overview of several decades of scholarship on reflection and meta-cognition. Yancey defines these terms and traces how research on reflection has evolved over time.