I learnt something today? Slides on reflective practice

Reflective learning is becoming a big deal at the moment, which is not surprising given some of the different contexts in which we have to understand what learners do.  Below is a link to some prezi slides I did for a faculty seminar on reflective learning, which hopefully spark some ideas.


Prezi on Reflective Learning

I Learned Something Today... Reflection as a Learning Strategy on Prezi

Reflections on Extra Life

Failing in first semester is an unfortunate, but necessary experience for some law students. It can be difficult to find an appropriate response as an educator, particularly where a student tries hard but fails by a narrow margin. Repeating a unit can put a student behind, especially where there is no summer school option and a student's subjects get out of sync with their peers. Supplementary assessment just seems to set students up to fail at the same task that we already know they have a problem with. Disturbingly, there seems to be an increasing trend toward blaming the teaching in these situations. 'Extra Life' was an idea we cooked up to develop a different path which integrates students back into the learning community.

Teaching Tip: Assessing Reflective Journals

Reflective learning is increasingly used in higher ed, particularly for team projects or situated learning where the academic has no direct access to the learning environment. An online journal is a popular format, either an open blog, or more commonly one within the closed confines of an online learning system managed by the uni.

Reflective Learning – Where it's at?

It is a little strange to see the enthusiasm for reflective learning at the moment. I first encountered the concept about ten years ago as a means to assess situated/practical learning, a concept which was pretty fringey at the time. Basically, there was a small group of academics who, dissatisified with the lecture/exam didactic form of learning, were looking for ways to assess real knowledge production and work, connected to real projects. After all, there is so much real work to be done in the community, why spend out time building intricately crafted mazes for the students to run through?

Learning Module: Legal Knowledge and Reflective Learning

Download module

This is a two part exercise that works best if there is a week between classes for students to reflect and think about their knowledge. I tend to combine this with other learning modules during each of the weeks, but you might find that students have enough meat to fill a class, especially if you return to them with 'new developments' in the scenario.

This task asks students to think about the way in which disciplinary knowledge effects your point of view (POV) on a social issue or dispute. The first part focusses on an interpersonal dispute, the second takes that dispute into the broader social context.

This is a fairly introductory task and it does allow for problem based learning – there is no specific correct answer and part of the fun involves seeing how the different disciplines contest each others knowledge, particularly how law insinuates itself as the top dog in the knowledge pack.

In the second part of this task we introduce reflective learning, give students a short guide to reflective learning and then ask them to reflect on their answers to the first part, using the second task as a means of returning to the original ideas, but from a different angle. Most students will find that if a week has elapsed between tasks, that their knowledge will have evolved, they will have discussed ideas with others and drawn connections between the task and other areas of study. If they have done these things and can describe what has happened, they are well on the way to becoming reflecitve learners.

Talking Legal Literacies

Assuming that this blog has done a reasonable job in convincing you that legal literacies have an important place in the law curriculum, how do you go about introducing students to these concepts? I'm happy to present Talking Legal Literacies, a short book of legal literaacies learning modules which can be used individually or as a course of study where each builds on the knowledge laid down in earlier tasks. This was one result of our initial legal literacies grant and these activities are scaffolded into my first year unit, Legal Research Methods.

Eventually, I will post each of the different modules to this site as individual learning modules, along with a commentary on each exploring how they have worked and evolved over time. As usual, this is all under a creative commons license which allows you to use, remix with the usual limitations on noncommerical use and attribution.

In my Legal Research Methods subject, these 10 modules are used for weekly tutorial/seminar tasks. Each team has a student team leader who writes a reflective report worth 30% of their assessment. This means that reflective learning has to be introduced in the lectures and in the tutorials and students need the confidence to develop their reflective learning capacity. This is particularly worrisome for some students as the tasks do not require academic references (although they can do further research if they want to) and the method foregrounds a student's own learning process as uncharrted territory for exploration.

It is very important to set clear learning objectives for reflective reports, SOLOs for each grade level, tied to subject objectives.

Each module contains help for students writing reports. A 'putting it all together' section connects the task to broader course concern and a 'think about it' section which poses a set of reflective questions, any one of which could be developed as the backbone of a report.

Reflective learning. Some students hate it. They want a lecturer to assert authority, tell them whether they are right or wrong. But on the whole students seem to appreciate the need to develop their reflective skills, especially if they aim to do workplace and situated learning as part of their course. Interestingly enough, this year we've had the some of the first students to report that they did reflective learning at high school, so perhaps it will not be such a strange idea for long.