Center for Teaching and Learning

What is Reflection?

 

Reflection: Helping Students Make the Connection
 Reflection is one of the most important tools necessary to ensuring a successful service-learning experience. It is the means through which someone can make sense of what they are seeing and doing and learn from it. The complete reflection process is essentially never-ending. It stays with students during every step of their journey and assists them in searching through the basic questions of: what, so what, and now what? According to, "The Practitioner's Guide to Reflection in Service-Learning," there are four important principles to keep in mind for effective critical reflection: continuous, connected, challenging and contextualized.

Continuous: Reflection is ongoing, occurring before, during, and after students' service experiences.

Connected: Reflection provides opportunities to integrate learning from service with academic content or personal development, including ways in which service experiences illustrate concepts, theories and societal trends.

Challenging: Reflection supports and challenges students to engage issues by thinking critically, pushing them to pose stimulating questions and to develop alternative explanations for their initial perceptions and observations of their experiences.

Conceptualized: Reflection relies for analysis on the context of the issues being discussed and the service setting. It occurs in various forms (formal and informal, journaling, artistic expression, video) and settings (in the classroom, at the community site, one-on-one with another student or community member, in small and large groups.)

(Eyler, Giles and Schmiede (1996), A Practitioner's Guide to Reflection in Service-Learning. Vanderbilt University )

Reflection leads to understanding, which in turn leads to more informed action.

Effective reflection leads to a better understanding of social problems and to the quest for better solutions.Faculty members utilize a variety of methods and tools to conduct reflection. Whatever forms of reflection are chosen, it is important to start integrating reflection into the course early in the semester to assure that students understand the process and its connection to the service-learning experience.

(University of Minnesota)

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