Sarah L. Ash, North Carolina State University

Patti H. Clayton, PHC Ventures/Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Applied learning pedagogies—including service-learning, internships/practica, study abroad, and undergraduate research—have in common both the potential for significant student learning and the challenges of facilitating and assessing that learning, often in non-traditional ways that involve experiential strategies outside the classroom as well as individualized outcomes. Critical reflection oriented toward well-articulated learning outcomes is key to generating, deepening, and documenting student learning in applied learning.

Reflection Assignment from: Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning

Critical Reflection Assignment (structured with DEAL) for Academic Learning

Sarah L. Ash, North Carolina State University

Patti H. Clayton, PHC Ventures/Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Debra Coulson & Marina Harvey, Learning and Teaching Centre, Macquarie University

Reflection is widely posited as a professional practice and process that supports students to learn through experience. Effective reflection for learning through experience requires a high level of introspection and open-minded self-analysis, a capacity for abstract learning, and self-regulation and agency that few students in higher education innately possess. Reflection can, however, be learnt and taught through strategic interventions and careful scaffolding.

Mary Ryan, Centre for Learning Innovation, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology

Despite the common use of the term reflection in higher education assessment tasks, learners are not often taught how to communicate their disciplinary knowledge through reflection. This paper argues that students can and should be taught how to reflect in deep and transformative ways. It highlights the reflexive pedagogical balancing act of attending to different levels of reflection as a way to stimulate focused, thoughtful and reasoned reflections that show evidence of new ways of thinking and doing.

Reflection Prompts for: The pedagogical balancing act: teaching reflection in higher education

Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle was developed by Graham Gibbs in 1988 to give structure to learning from experiences.  It offers a framework for examining experiences, and given its cyclic nature lends itself particularly well to repeated experiences, allowing you to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well. It covers 6 stages:

• Description of the experience
• Feelings and thoughts about the experience
• Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
• Analysis to make sense of the situation
• Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
• Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.

Jennifer White

Engaging with youth and families in collaborative and respectful ways; taking practical actions to create the conditions for young people to experience meaning, worth and connection; supporting them to imagine hopeful futures for themselves; and bringing oneself fully to the therapeutic relationship are all hallmark characteristics of child and youth care (CYC) practice. Those who do this work and those who prepare practitioners for the field recognize the need for conceptual frameworks that can adequately represent the complexities of everyday CYC practice. By taking up the notion of praxis as knowing, doing and being in context, I hope to plant some fresh seeds to animate and extend current conceptualizations of everyday CYC practice.