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Reflection

Reflection can promote intellectual, ethical and personal growth in your students. Find out how you can facilitate this maturation process.

Reflection: It's easier than you think!

Best Practices

Advanced Reflection Tactics for High School Students

Reflection: It's easier than you think!

Reflection is one of the most important elements of service-learning, but it is often the element that teachers who are new to service-learning struggle with most often. Reflection does not have to be a struggle!

It is important that students are given an opportunity to reflect before, during and after a service-learning project, so that they may shape the course of their service-learning project and handle problems as they arise. Reflection prior to the service experience is especially important if the students will be visiting an environment such as a nursing home where they will deal with a geriatric population, some of which may be very ill.

Other environments that require pre-reflection activities are hospitals, hospices, animal shelters, homeless shelters and soup kitchens. All of these places can bring students face-to-face with an aspect of life that may be new, and perhaps, frightening to them. One way to ensure that students are properly prepared to enter an emotionally charged community setting would be to invite a representative of the agency to come to the classroom prior to the project and introduce the students to some of the issues and realities of the population they will encounter during the project.

The most popular form of reflection is that old stand-by, the journal. While there is nothing wrong with utilizing journals to reflect, students tend to get bored with frequent exercises that only involve traditional journal writing exercises. To enhance journal writing, try either of these alternative journal activities:

#1: The Classroom Journal
In this exercise, students reflect upon their classmates' and teacher's journal entries. Prompt your students by writing the first entry. Then, each day, have a different student take the journal home and write an entry that reflects upon the most recent contribution before their own.

#2: The Community Journal
A community journal is one that the students share with the community agency staff or community members during a service-learning project. At the agency or work site, students ask community members to add an entry to the journal about their project experience or work at the agency. To get the ball rolling, you should prompt the community members with journaling ideas. Try to collect as many community entries as there are students in your class. After the service-learning project is over, assign students different community entries upon which to reflect and respond.

Classroom discussions can be one of the most stimulating forms of reflection for service-learning. Discussing real-world issues and themes that are relevant to the service-learning project provides students with an opportunity to explore critical thinking skills, communication skills and current events with their peers. Here are a few suggestions for making your classroom discussions more exciting and productive:

1. Invite a community representative to lead the discussion.
2. Have each student take a turn at leading the discussion.
3. Cut out articles from the newspaper that relate to the service-learning project and have the students discuss the broader issues that are involved.
4. Videotape each discussion and make a reflective video at the end of the project, so that students remember the issues discussed and the results of each discussion.
5. Have each student bring an object related to the service-learning project (tool, photograph, etc.) to the discussion and share the relevance of the object to their service-learning experience.

Using the visual arts is another way to introduce reflection into your classroom in a more creative way. Paint and paper or digital media can be very compelling mediums for both younger and older students to express their thoughts about their service-learning experiences. Any of these ideas can help get you started:

#1: Photographic Journal
Instead of having students simply write in journals, have them take photographs of the service-learning project and write journal entries in response to the photographs they've taken.

#2: Project Website
Many students have a real knack for website design. As your project progresses, have the students create a website so that their service-learing project can be shared in cyberspace with parents, students, community members and project partners.

#3: Bulletin Boards
School bulletin boards that are in public areas of the school can be a great way for students to share their service-learning project with the student body, teachers and school administration. Have your class adopt one of the school's bulletin boards and keep everyone updated about what is going on with service-learning. Students can take pictures of the project and post them, as well as post other literature related to the project, such as thank-you letters from community members written in response to the project.

Whatever form of reflection you pursue in your service-learning project, remember that reflection is just as important as the service itself. Reflection is also a great way to connect your service-learning project to the curriculum and meet academic standards. The more connections between service and academics, the better the reflection activity.

Think out of the box in terms of how you approach reflection, and in no time you'll have your students reflecting before, during and after every service-learning project without even realizing they're doing so!

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Best Practices

Reflection is one of service-learning’s most crucial and least understood steps. Reflection activities not only help students draw connections between the service experience, the class work and their lives, but also challenge students to synthesize concepts with observations and address challenging questions. Well-designed reflection utilizes Eyler, Giles and Schmiede’s (1996) Four Cs: continuous, connected, contextualized and challenging. This article explains the Four Cs for teachers who wish to design reflection activities that encourage further learning and skill development.

Some quick and careful planning can ensure that your reflection activities push students to gain an improved understanding of the lesson, the community issue and their roles as citizens. Make sure to develop reflection activities that are neither supplementary to nor separate from the lesson plan, but are integrated into an overarching effort to push learning further. Then ensure that the activities meet the Four Cs framework.

Reflection that is continuous is integrated before, throughout and after the service experience. For example, students may learn a lot about their own biases and personal development if they are asked to write about their feelings regarding older people before, during and after a semester-long effort to document community history through regular interviews at the local senior center. Similarly, asking students to describe the importance of recycling before and after an environmental science unit may press them to gain a greater appreciation for the value of classroom learning.

Connected reflection relates directly to the curriculum and/or the service experience, ensuring that students’ reflections stay on topic. Ideally, reflection connects to both the service and the curriculum. Students who help at a food bank or soup kitchen could be asked to make posters that represent what foods compose a healthy meal and what kinds of donations the agency needs to ensure that they can serve such meals. This activity allows students to represent their thoughts artistically, requires students to demonstrate their understanding of nutrition and connects to the service project by developing a product that the agency could use, specifically, posters that will enhance public awareness and encourage donations.

Contextualized reflection encourages teachers to give depth and meaning to reflection activities by emphasizing the community or curricular context. “What are your responsibilities as a citizen?” for example, may be a good reflection activity to encourage personal development. To contextualize that question and give it more power, however, an English teacher might ask, “Based on what you learned about how community organizations rely on volunteers, when we developed a pamphlet for the Human Society, do you think people have responsibilities as citizens? What are they?”

Finally, challenging reflection pushes students to address difficult issues and inconsistencies, therefore requiring and encouraging thoughtful analysis and synthesis of the service-learning experience. One route to challenging reflection is to present paradoxes. A civics teacher, for example, could ask students to write an essay on the following topic: “Most Americans suggest that citizenship comes with responsibilities such as community participation and voting, yet many Americans do not vote. Why might this be, and what can you do to make sure you live up to your own ideals?”

Continuous, connected, contextualized and challenging reflection is instrumental in ensuring academically and developmentally rewarding service-learning. This crucial component ensures that the class can benefit from the substantial pedagogical advantages that service-learning provides, a benefit that is not attained when volunteer service and coursework are completed separately.

Notes: J. Eyler, D. Giles, and A. Schmiede, A Practitioner’s Guide to Reflection in Service-Learning: Student Voices and Reflections (Vanderbilt UP, 1996)

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Advanced Reflection Tactics for High School Students

Experienced educators are all veterans of the best and worst of student responses to difficult questions. Reflection often leads teachers and students down these volatile pathways, where seemingly uninterested students may suddenly issue interesting insights and usually engaged students turn away from the discussion or assignment for no apparent reason. Fortunately, educators have integrated developmental models with techniques for moving students along in their growth process. In an article that is transferable to most types of reflection, Professor Joan Scott distilled twenty-five years of journal analysis and lessons learned for service-learning educators.

Scott draws information from William Perry’s “Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The Making of Meaning” (1981) to assess the students’ journal entries and determine appropriate responses. Perry suggested that students and adults journey through nine positions with respect to moral and intellectual development. Many researchers arrange these nine positions into four broader stages: Dualism, Multiplicity, Relativism and Commitment in Relativism. Understanding these stages and the appropriate methods for moving students from one stage to the next is helpful during reflection.

Many high school students still function according to the Dualism stage, in which the world appears in absolutes of right and wrong. In this stage, the student looks for truth through the accumulation of correct knowledge and does not tolerate ambiguity well. Students who reflect on their service in a dualistic manner are likely to attribute an entire social problem to a single cause or reason, and they are less likely to address possibly complicated explanations. Dualistic students might, for example, suggest that helping at a soup kitchen is a nice thing to do as long as people in the shelter learn from their mistakes. Teachers could challenge students to broaden their perspective by asking provocative questions, such as, “What about people who are in homeless shelters because they fled abusive situations? Do you consider the decision to flee their abusive home a mistake? Is it possible to serve without judging or needing to know the other person’s experience?”

The next stage is Multiplicity, in which the student recognizes the potential for multiple valid viewpoints, becomes more tolerant of others’ views and understands that authority figures may not have found the correct answer yet. Multiplicity could also be considered a somewhat cynical stage, as students often begin to perceive of perspectives as “the way they want us to think” and have not yet moved to a point where they are willing to consider relative merit to determine differential worth. In student-speak, it’s all good (or bad).

Despite Perry’s clear and clean model of development, students may experience considerable inner turmoil as they move along the continuum. They may even become alienated by the notion of multiple truths and therefore choose a quantitatively focused and precise career rather than address ambiguity. Others may reject the vexing exposure to multiple viewpoints by turning away from higher education opportunities. Nonetheless, progress through the stages is important for developing students who want to participate in an exceptionally diverse and internationally integrated society.

The transition to Relativism involves a major shift in the student’s thinking. As the student begins to recognize that there are no right answers, he/she also realizes that authority has to reason through issues and questions, as well. This is often troubling, as things seem to become less certain. Often even more troubling, however, is the student’s recognition that this ambiguity applies not only to academic exercises, but also to life circumstances. As the student moves from Relativism to Commitment in Relativism, he/she begins to recognize the necessity of choosing among perspectives and making commitments based on relative, contextual merit.

In Commitment in Relativism, the student accepts contradictions and questions as part of life, learning to integrate learned knowledge with personal experience and reflection to make and live with a series of decisions and commitments. The student continues to consciously consider alternatives to engage in commitment as an ongoing, unfolding, evolving activity.

To lessen the dangers of alienation and escape during the first few stages, a careful combination of challenge and support can help students progress from one stage to another. Students may make progress within stages before making the leap from one stage to the next. Developmental psychologists refer to the “+1 principle” to describe pressing the student to consider ideas approximately one position beyond his or her own. The +1 principle is considered the optimal prescription for prodding students along their developmental pathways. Challenge is appropriate to nudge the student along in their thinking, but support should be applied as well.

Scott suggests a few scenarios in which students should definitely be supported: (a) the student is in transition between an ‘old’ or comfortable way of thinking and knowing to a new stage; (b) the student is aware of what he/she would like to do to change and simply needs assurance; (c) the student is experiencing feelings or reactions that he/she risks expressing, in which case assurance that it is okay to express those feelings may be appropriate; (d) the student is doing a great job and well-earned praise is in order.

Scott also provides a few comments that can challenge students who are still Dualistic in their thinking. For example, “How can you be so sure?” “Okay – you liked the reading. What can you critique about it?” “Would all the evidence, or all the experience, point to the same conclusion?” “Can you think of a third or fourth perspective on this question?” (Scott). Questions that examine the quality of evidence, logic and argument may press students in the Multiplicity stage to move forward. Consider this question as an example, “During the 50s, most experts supported Theory X. By the 60s, that support had eroded somewhat and today almost all experts support Theory Y. Based on the evidence that has been gained over the last several decades, indicate whether you agree with the experts’ assessment of this evidence and why.”

Many students may transition out of Dualism while they are in high school. Still others may transition further along the continuum. Regardless of the student’s developmental stage, it is important to support and prod along the way. As students enter new stages, they may be advancing their own well-reasoned opinions for the first time. It is essential to support their progress even while challenging them to move further.

Scott, Joan (1993) “A Journal Workshop for Coordinators” In Galura, J. and Howard, J. (eds.) Praxis II: Service-Learning Resources for University Students, Staff and Faculty. The Office of Community Service-Learning Press: Ann Arbor, MI.

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