How to Deepen Learning through Critical Reflection

Too many students simply acquire pieces of knowledge without establishing relationships among them, integrating new information with prior learning, or grappling with big questions. Critical reflection can engage students in learning that challenges their assumptions and deepens the way they understand issues and concepts.

A college education is about more than just accumulating knowledge. To reach deeper levels of understanding, a student must be able to construct meaning out of a purposeful combination of experiences and academic materials.

All too often, however, academic depth is sacrificed to breadth. When the main learning goal is to cover as much material in a semester as possible, it’s not surprising that profound critical thinking goals tends to be glossed over in favor of more superficial learning objectives.

Critical reflection is one of the best ways to overcome this common problem. When intentionally and carefully designed, critical reflection activities motivate students to “dig deep” and engage in the intensive process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning academic experiences and content knowledge.

Order this Seminar

In How to Deepen Learning through Critical Reflection, Barbara Jacoby, PhD., senior scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park explains how understanding in every subject can be enhanced through the incorporation of meaningful critical reflection activities. She describes the steps involved in designing critical reflection course components and explains how these strategies can lead to the achievement of desired learning outcomes.

She also addresses the common misconception that reflection activities are “touchy-feely” exercises lacking in academic rigor and provides clear guidance on how to facilitate and assess the learning gained through critical reflection exercises.

Here’s a brief clip from the seminar:

This 90-minute audio online seminar covers:

• How to design intentional critical reflection course activities
• What critical reflection is and is not
• Matching reflective exercises to course-based learning outcomes
• Effective strategies for engaging students in reflection
• Facilitation methods
• How reflection can address the “big questions” in a discipline
• The role of reflection in questioning prior knowledge and assumptions
• Using reflection to challenge simplistic conclusions
• Opening students to transformative learning and the multiplicity of perspectives
• How service-learning and experiential learning offer reflective opportunities
• Producing evidence of learning for evaluation purposes

This seminar also includes critical reflection case studies to demonstrate its application in specific course scenarios.

Order this Seminar

Who will benefit?
This seminar is recommended for all campus professionals concerned with deepening the learning achieved at your institution, including:

• Faculty members in all disciplines
• Faculty involved in service-learning and other experiential learning courses
• Faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs professionals who coordinate internships, service-learning, and study abroad opportunities
• Faculty trainers
• Directors and staff of Centers of Teaching and Learning
• Student affairs professionals
• Directors and staff of service-learning, community service, and civic engagement offices or programs
• Campus ministers and leadership educators

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the seminar transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order this Seminar

A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

This kind of reflection is particularly important for students in professional programs where the goal is not just to develop content knowledge but to help students acquire the skills that will enable them to function competently in professional situations. When students do not have much experience in professional settings, they need to learn as much as possible from their experiences. This requires the kind of reflection that occurs when they return to the experiences, recall what happened, think about what they assumed, consider what might have happened if they had taken a different course of action, and thoughtfully consider what they learned from the experience.

However, students are not born knowing how to reflect on experiences, critically or otherwise. In fact, the authors of the article referenced below were motivated to intervene in students’ attempts to reflect (in this case on clinical experiences in a nursing program) when they noted the wide variation in how students wrote about their experiences. They decided that what students needed was a “structure that would help them make more in-depth descriptions of clinical experiences and their thinking about those situations.” (p. 513)

The authors developed a guide for reflection based on a clinical judgment model from their field. The guide lists a series of prompts that the instructions say will “help you tell the story of the situation you encountered.” (p. 515) There are prompts that solicit descriptions of relevant background details, others that ask what the student noticed, a set of prompts that encourage interpretation of the situation, more that have the students delineate their responses, and a question that asks about reaction to the response. The guide ends with a series of prompts that help students articulate what they learned from the experience. This particular guide (which appears in the article) is specific to nursing, but it could easily be adapted to other clinical or field experience situations.

The guide was developed to help students, but it benefits faculty as well. It provides a “window” into student thinking about experiences. This can be especially helpful when faculty have not observed a student in a particular situation.

The authors recommend using a guide like this more than once in a course. “Consistent use of the guide throughout a course provides students with repetitive practice using a specific process to consider patient care and clinical practice.” (p. 516) This way the guide becomes a rubric that students can take with them into any professional experience.

Reference: Nielsen, A., Stragnell, S., and Jester, P. (2007). Guide for reflection using the clinical judgment model. Journal of Nursing Education, 46 (11), 513-516.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, March 2008.

Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions

Motivating students to actively participate in class is a challenge even for the most experienced educators. The words “excruciating,” “agonizing,” and “mentally draining” likely come to mind. A lot of students seem to assume that as long as the assigned work is completed on time, test scores are good, and attendance is satisfactory, they shouldn’t be forced to participate.

If you’re looking for proven strategies to help stimulate more active learning, you’ll want to download this FREE special report Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions.

Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

As proof of just how important classroom participation is to the learning process … and just hard it is to get students to participate … consider that most professors now include participation as part of the overall course grade. If they didn’t, few students would participate. And yet, despite the incentives to participate, research indicates that only about 25 percent of students in a course actively volunteer answers and contribute on a regular basis.

Of course every class has a couple overparticipators who are eager to volunteer every answer (sometimes to the point of dominating the discussion, which creates its own problems for educators and fellow students alike) but it seems that a good number of students would rather listen, observe, or perhaps daydream rather than engage in the class discussion. Whether they’re shy, unprepared,or simply reluctant to share their thoughts and opinions, getting students to participate is a constant struggle.

This special report features 11 articles that highlight effective strategies and tricks for establishing the expectation of participation, facilitating meaningful discussion, using questions appropriately, and creating a supportive learning environment.

Articles you will find in this report include:

• Putting the Participation Puzzle Together
• Student Recommendations for Encouraging Participation
• To Call or Not to Call: That Continues to Be the Question
• Creating a Class Participation Rubric
• Those Students Who Participate Too Much
• Assessing Class Participation: One Useful Strategy
• Teaching How to Question: Participation Rubrics

Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

As a teacher you want to create a classroom environment that helps students of various learning styles and personalities to feel comfortable enough to contribute. To reach this goal requires a constant balancing act of encouraging quiet, reflective students to speak up and, occasionally, asking the most active learners to hold back from commenting in order to give others a chance. Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions will provide you with practical strategies for doing just that.

Download the report for free when you join the Faculty Focus community

Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material – not just about active student participation, but all of today’s hot button issues that are important to faculty and administrators. It’s packed with ideas, best practices, and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school and your work, including:

• Instructional Design
• Faculty Development
• Distance Learning
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Faculty Evaluation
• Learning Styles
• Curriculum Development
• Community College Issues
• Trends in Higher Education
• And much, much more.

If you’re looking for new strategies that will put an end to passive learning, you’ll want to download Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions, a special report developed to help you increase student participation in even the most lecture-centric course.

Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account