Baby steps, quilts, and reflection

Being that this is my first foray into thinking about reflection, I’m taking some baby steps. I’m still trying to develop a definition of reflection and metacognition that still allows them to overlap but can also be speaking about two different ideas. I may not be offering anything groundbreaking or new, but I want to outline what I’ve been picking up through my experiences and through these readings.

So, fundamentally, I recognize that metacognition and reflection are speaking to two different ideas—the difference between these two terms is how I’ve been developing my definition of the two. I first think about metacognition—“thinking about thinking one’s own thought processes” has been tossed around quite a bit. But I think about metacognition through “being metacognitive” which, to me, centers on an awareness. And through this awareness, we are able to self-regulate. LaVaque-Manty and Evans map out a pretty succinct way to understand the process of self-regulating for one’s learning:

Planning one’s learning: Plan for the task by thinking about what one already knows or can do and what else one needs to complete the tasks

 Monitoring one’s learning: Pay attention to one’s execution of the task and somehow communicate what one takes oneself is to be doing

 Evaluating one’s learning: Evaluate how one did, particularly in light of external feedback on the execution and what one learned from the execution and the feedback

Metacognition, then, seems to be this awareness—or consciousness—that allows someone to access a network of ideas to move forward, to solve a problem. Reflection, then seems to be how to access that metacognition, but also help scaffold that metacognition.

I agree that reflection is both a product and a process. In terms of process, reflection seems to be that process that allows us to acknowledge our thought processes and connect those processes. One way to connect those processes is to name the experience that a person is having in order to categorize that experience against other similar experiences. Connected to that idea is how, I believe, reflection is necessarily an articulation—we often ask our students to write a reflection or to make one and I think that’s important to the process. To be able to have the reflection to manipulate those thoughts and to see them allows those ideas to be organized, arranged, and accordingly categorized to understand how ideas are networked against one another. In the WEPO piece (written by Dr. Yancey and our lovely colleagues) portfolios are allowing reflection to be a normal part of class. These portfolios, which obviously have written reflections, also allow for design: the design of those portfolios contributes to how students are representing how they’re connecting ideas visually.

I had a student last year that made a portfolio with the theme of quilts: the visuals she used and how she constructed the theme allowed her to understand the material as constructing a whole: what an interesting way to think about the course content that allows her to connect ideas together.

So, reflection, of course, is a process of connecting ideas from the past and present, but it’s also important to point out how it’s necessarily an articulation. And reflection then allows us to become metacognitve or, in other words, develop a consciousness of thought that can help us solve new problems.

This may not have been helpful or new to you guys, but (in the spirit of reflection) I think I needed to think through what I was reading by writing it down.