Should I use reflection in my initiative?

While the language on this page is centred on courses and uses educational terminology it lends itself to any kind of activity. Within the page, the following terms are used. 

Term	How we use it
Initiative	Refers to any experience you may host. This can be a course, a workshop, a training programme, professional accreditation programme, etc. ‘Course’ is sometimes used interchangeably.
Alignment	Refers to when learning outcomes, assessment, and teaching strategies match up and support one another

Overview

It can be challenging to create or update any initiative. Decisions about what elements go into it have a great effect on ease of implementation, preparation time, and the satisfaction of the participants. For many, reflection is a new approach and therefore making the decision to adopt it into your initiative is not always easy.

This page explores how reflection can be used and where it might be helpful. Moreover, it asks you to consider the current state of your initiative and hopefully this will help make it clear if reflection can be helpful within it.

When designing any initiative and its components, there should be a direct link or alignment between what you want people to learn from it and the assignments or activities they do. This is essential to have in mind when thinking about whether or not you should incorporate reflection.  The fundamental questions are:

• Will reflection help the participants of your initiative to obtain what you want them to learn, or help you see that they have learned it? 
• Is reflection one of the things you want your participants to learn or develop?

If you already know your answer, you can use the links at the bottom of the page to jump to the relevant section.

If you are not sure of the answer, the sections below provide further guidance and ideas.  The main elements covered are:

• whether or not you see value yourself in reflection
• educational alignment – how reflection can support or serve as an element of, learning outcome, or assessment tasks within your initiative
• reflecting on your own initiative to see if and how reflection can be applied appropriately
• places to seek inspiration and specific situations where reflection works well.

 

Do you see the value in reflection?

One of the most crucial elements to consider is to think about the possible value from reflection. Some outcomes reflection can assist with include:

• Allowing us to improve our own practice to gain better outcomes in the future
• Increasing/improving our performance and skills
• Increasing our awareness of our abilities and attributes and our evidence for these
• Developing and expanding our employability
• Evaluating the quality and success of our action plans
• Applying theoretical knowledge/frameworks to real experiences and using this to expand our understanding of the underlying theory.

You should, of course, only implement reflection if you see its value. Some people find it immediately valuable, natural, and worthwhile; others do not. Even if reflection would fit quite naturally into your course, if you do not personally believe in its value this is a strong indication that you should not implement it. 

If you do see the value – that is great! We do too. The following sections should help you think whether reflection can then naturally fit into your initiative.

 

Learning outcomes, assessments, and teaching strategies

Whatever you initiative is, it is essential to have an idea of what participants should take away from it and how to get there.

In the simplest form:

• Learning outcomes are what we want participants to know or be able to do when they complete the initiative
• Assessments are the kind of tasks that can help reveal whether participants have achieved the desired learning outcomes.
• Teaching strategies are the way we prepare participants to complete the assessments – and thereby also function as a way of helping participants obtain the learning outcomes.

If you are not in a course context, these three can be conceptualised as: ‘your reason for doing the workshop/programme/etc’, ‘your measurement of success’, and ‘the things you do in the workshop/programme/etc’.

Reflection can be all three – examples

As a learning outcome, ‘The ability to critically reflect’ might be used. If reflection is used as a learning outcome, it should also appear as teaching strategy or assessment.

As an assessment, in a course context we might want to create a summative report at the end of the course where students reflect on what they have learned and how they will use it in the future. This way we can easily see if they have obtained our learning outcomes.

As a strategy, in a course we might ask students during a lecture to explore a series of reflective prompts with each other about their study habits or how they tackle assignments, while also identifying places for improvements. This might help students to be more effective in obtaining the learning outcomes or become more efficient in the assessment.

Alignment is key

When designing any initiative and its components, there should be a direct link or alignment between what you want people to learn from it and the assignments or activities they do. This is essential to have in mind when thinking about whether or not you should incorporate reflection. 

 

Reflect on your own initiative

A good place to start when determining if alignment is possible is revisiting the learning outcomes you have defined for your initiative to ensure that they are as clear and informed as possible:

• Are they the best representation of what you want participants to get from your initiative?
• What could you change to make them more clear/helpful/useful/accurate?
• Would you understand what you needed to learn if you were a student?

When you are clear about, and happy with, your learning outcomes you can use a similar process with your assessment and teaching strategies.

In the process, it might become clear to you whether reflection has a place in your initiative. If you have found that reflection does not have a place, but you are still interested in using it you can ask yourself what changes you would need to make to create space for reflection.

This process can help to implement reflection thoughtfully and doing otherwise can be detrimental. In particular, requiring students to reflect in an assignment but not giving them any guidelines and hoping they will find their own way to do it and gather their own meaning from it, can often frustrate both the reflectors and the facilitators. This can also be harmful as people can create their own misconceptions of what reflection is and often associate it with something negative.

Examining your initiative should help to ensure that reflection will be appropriately applied – or that reflection does not belong there.

 

Look for inspiration in others’ work

For further inspiration to see what types of reflective tasks are possible – this can be both assessment or teaching strategies – it can be helpful to review the ‘Components of reflective tasks’ page and related pages. These provide guidance for common sorts of practice and the main decisions that are required regarding reflective tasks.

Components of reflective tasks (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

Moreover, looking at case studies of colleagues’ practice might inspire you on how to implement reflection to support learning. Similarly, below you can find a list of characteristics of initiatives that lend themselves easily to reflection and where it might be helpful.

Case studies (within the Facilitator's Toolkit)

Areas where it can be beneficial and/or easy to incorporate reflection:

The list below is in no way exhaustive, but can provide a window into the types of initiatives where reflection fits well.

• Any kind of experiential learning programme
• During, or as a conclusion/debrief to, placements or work experiences
• Skills courses
• Any activity where surfacing and communicating skills is essential, for example employability
• Longer projects or assignments that require planning and a range of skills, for example dissertations
• Any course that has an element of development towards becoming a successful professional, chemist, psychologist, mathematician, etc.
  • Many subjects have a desired skillset upon completion outlined by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK (QAA) in their benchmark statements
• Any course that provides feedback can incorporate reflective elements into how students use their feedback
• Continued Professional Development (CPD) in any field
• Places where a learning outcome is adopting/developing a reflective mindset or practice
• Personal Development Planning (PDP) – universities are required by the QAA to support their students with PDP; reflection is an excellent way to support this development.

Lastly, reflection is a valuable skill in its own right, which allows people to give themselves feedback and improve. A successful implementation of reflection in an initiative can help students develop a reflective approach that they can use elsewhere.

QAA's benchmark statements (external website)

 

Next steps

Having used the information and prompts above, revisit the fundamental questions:

• Will reflection help the participants of your initiative to obtain what you want them to learn, or help you see that they have learned it? 
• Is reflection one of the things you want your participants to learn or develop?

If the answer is ‘yes’

If the answer is ‘no’ or ‘not really’