{"id":283,"date":"2023-01-20T16:26:59","date_gmt":"2023-01-21T00:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/?page_id=283"},"modified":"2023-02-06T15:11:07","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T23:11:07","slug":"blog-post-78","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/faculty-blog\/blog-post-78\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflective Writing for Online or Face-to-Face Instruction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--rich-text \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--rich-text\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n      \n<div class=\"f--field f--wysiwyg\">\n\n    \n  <p class=\"story-sub-title\">The Pedagogy of \u201cLearning How to Learn\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-byline\"><strong>By Amber Foster, Assistant (Teaching) Professor, The Writing Program<\/strong> &#8211; April 27, 2021<\/p>\n<div class=\"html-content story-content\">\n<p>Last Tuesday, I started my classes by asking my students to write for ten minutes about their feelings about the end of the semester. What would they remember, after the semester ended? What were they looking forward to most, after finals?<\/p>\n<p>To my surprise, many of them brought up the activity in their one-on-one conferences with me later that week. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy to think I\u2019ve been going to college a whole year, and I\u2019ve never even been to campus,\u201d one of my freshmen said. Nearly all of them said they were looking forward to being a \u201creal\u201d college student\u2014living in the dorms, sitting in lecture halls, socializing with friends in McCarthy Quad. An entire year of online learning had also taught them a thing or two about resilience.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI never really take the time to think back on how far I\u2019ve come,\u201d another student confided.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I chose this journaling exercise, and others, as a means to help students process their feelings about the past year. Some questions I\u2019ve asked in recent weeks include:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>When you look back on this moment ten years from now, what will you remember? <\/i><\/li>\n<li><i>How has the pandemic changed the way you perceive the world, and others?<\/i><\/li>\n<li><i>What life skills will you take away from this year of remote learning? <\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The writing and subsequent discussion provided a space for students to connect with each other and reflect on their experiences\u2014the good along with the bad\u2014and many of my fall semester students later cited the journaling prompts as one of their favorite aspects of the course.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Yet it\u2019s also worth noting that reflective writing isn\u2019t solely diaries or journals. In fact, reflective (or \u201cself-reflective\u201d) writing encompasses a wide variety of writing tasks, such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>reflective essays<\/li>\n<li>fieldwork reports<\/li>\n<li>freewrites<\/li>\n<li>self-assessments<\/li>\n<li>peer feedback<\/li>\n<li>logbooks (science fields)<\/li>\n<li>reflective notes (law)<a href=\"#ftn1\"><sup><sup>[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The more guided forms of reflective assignments typically involve having students deliberate on their own learning processes, and by so doing, develop their problem-solving and critical reasoning skills (or what is sometimes informally called \u201clearning how to learn\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, much of the current appraoches to reflective practice are indebted to the foundational work of Graham Gibbs, whose <i>Learning by Doing<\/i> (1988)generated a step-by-step method for build students\u2019 self-awareness during experiential learning activities. This is now widely known as Gibbs\u2019 Reflective Cycle (shared below, for your reference):<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_288\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-288\" style=\"width: 714px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-288\" src=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/172\/2023\/01\/Gibbs-Graham-768x432.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"714\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/172\/2023\/01\/Gibbs-Graham-300x252.png 300w, https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/172\/2023\/01\/Gibbs-Graham.png 1980w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 714px) 100vw, 714px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-288\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From Gibbs, Graham. Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods, Further Education Unit at Oxford Polytechnic, 1988.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In this method, a student is asked to move through the steps one at a time, reflecting on an experience (or a simulated experience, such as a role play). It forces them to slow down\u2014to not simply record an experience, but learn how to think critically about what occurred and make a plan for next time. This can be especially useful in healthcare and fields with an experiential component.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I do a similar kind of instructor-guided reflection after providing written feedback in my writing and critical reasoning courses. After reading over all of my written comments, students are asked to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and respond to my written comments. Much like Gibbs\u2019 \u201cpersonal action plan,\u201d students must then generate a plan for improvement on the next writing project.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In the decades since the publication of <i>Learning by Doing<\/i>, reflective writing has become a cornerstone of the student-centered classroom, and for good reason. It is adaptable to many different fields and teaching contexts. It can take whatever form is needed to serve each instructor\u2019s particular learning objective. It can also, as it did in my classes, bring a challenging semester to a close with some deep thought and cautious optimism for the year ahead.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a name=\"ftn1\"><\/a>[1] \u201cExamples of Reflective Writing.\u201d University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, student.unsw.edu.au\/examples-reflective-writing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":0,"parent":220,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-283","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Reflective Writing for Online or Face-to-Face Instruction - Teaching at Dornsife<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/teaching-in-dornsife\/faculty-blog\/blog-post-78\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reflective Writing for Online or Face-to-Face Instruction - 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