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This is a short presentation
about reflection.
So, let's just say
that you have a little project
that you want to start.
And so you make a plan,
you locate the necessary materials
and the necessary tools,
and still, things don't quite
turn out the way you wished
that they would.
And so you ask yourself,
"What went wrong?"
That question is a classic
reflective question,
although "what went right?"
is also a good reflective question.
Reflection as a form of thinking
typically takes up questions like these:
When you do a project,
and something works,
you wonder to yourself,
"Why did this work, when that
other thing I tried did not?"
Or you ask yourself
"What was it that I tried? And what
did I learn when I tried it?"
Because sometimes, you know,
when we start a project,
we don't necessarily have a name
for what we're actually doing,
we just try something.
So a reflective question might
simply be, "What did I try there?"
Another reflective question might be
"What exactly happened?
And how do I feel about what happened?
And why do I feel that way?"
--all reflective questions.
And then finally, once you have
sort of put your hands on what
you think you know, or defined
the experience, and what went right
and what went wrong,
how does that fit in with
what you used to know,
or the way you thought about
the project when you began it?
Now, as college students, you may
often be asked to not only
think reflectively but to take up
a reflective essay as a form of writing.
When you write a reflective essay,
there are typically some steps
that you are going to take.
One is to look back.
at what you did.
What is it that you accomplished,
what is it that you tried,
what are the specific activities
that you engaged in?
And then, to reconsider them:
this sometimes means to
consider something that you thought of
as a failure in light of, maybe, what you
learned from it, or to think of something
that was a success, that later
you came to feel a little less thrilled with
in reconsidering it.
Finally, a piece of reflective writing
typically engages in a kind of
self-evaluation: what was the gain
in the learning experience,
what could you have gained
if you had tried this or that,
and so on.
Basically, you need to ask yourself,
when you're asked to do a piece
of reflective writing,
what aspects of your learning
are you being asked to examine?
--and usually an assignment will give you
hopefully at least hints, and maybe
more than hints--hopefully
specific requirements of things that
you should consider in a reflective essay.
John Dewey, who was one of the people
who framed many of our ideas
about reflective thinking,
said in a book called How We Think
written in 1933, that
reflective thought was characterized
by active, persistent, and careful
consideration of any belief
or supposed form of knowledge
--this is a kind of belief or knowledge
that you hold--
in the light of the grounds that support it
--i.e., what leads you to feel that way
about it, or to believe something--
and the further conclustions
to which it tends--
that is, where are those beliefs
going to take you.
Now, in terms of writing reflective essays,
this means that you should try
to connect the new things that you know
and have experienced
to your old ways of thinking about things.
Reflective writing should lead you to
evaluate your experience--
what was good and bad--
to cite details to support your evaluation--
the specifics of your learning experience,
what you tried and what you didn't try--
and hopefully a piece of
uh (awkward pause while narrator
searches for the word 'reflective')
of reflective writing will help you
figure out what was meaningful
in the experience
to you.
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