Models of Critical Reflection

For many educators unfamiliar with designing critical reflection activities and assignments, reflection is something that happens after an experience and that reflection is only appropriate for certain types of situations. In reality, critical reflection is a fundamental process of learning and meaning making. When getting started it's important to keep the following in mind:

Critical reflection can be designed to generate a variety of learning outcomes. These include knowledge, skills, as well as attitudes, values, dispositions and behaviors.
Everything is reflection worthy. As a result, it's important to guide learners to attend dimensions of experiences that are of interest.
Guidance matters. When designing critical reflection activities and assignments, the guidance provided, whether via written prompts, oral or graphic facilitation, should assist learners to articulate and document their learning coherently and cohesively.

In light of this, it's useful to remember, what have been termed the "4 C's of Critical Reflection." [Eyler and Giles]

4 C's of Critical Reflection

Provide learning opportunities to reflect before, during, and after the experience. The most common error that designers make is to limit reflection until after the experience. Improvements in CR capacity improve with time, practice and scaffolding. When integrating only within a course but across a program of study in order to build capacity for metacognition and critical consciousness building. Remember anything is reflection worthy. It is helpful to use a pre-mid-post structure, relative to the unit of time [session, week, semester, etc.], that focuses learner attention on changes in their assumptions and reasoning processes and on progress toward meeting objectives.

Experience, including service and community-based experiences, bring theories, concepts and statistics to life in palpable, contextualized and unscripted ways. Effective designers of CR, make sure to draw clear connections between the experiences and the frame/lens through that should be applied to the experience. Designers can use a variety of means to communicate the connection between academic content, as well as, other categories of learning [ professional, civic, personal, etc.] and "the experience" [e.g. syllabus, assignment instructions, lecture, etc.]

Critical Reflection requires stretching learners outside of their comfort zone to explore more difficult or challenging questions. It requires that the facilitator balance challenging learners while creating a supportive, safe space for learners to express doubt, frustration, and inspiration.

The mode of reflection/reflection mechanism should reflect the setting, be scaffolded appropriate to the learner.

Models of Critical Reflection

Models of Critical Reflection

4 C's of Critical Reflection

CONTINUOUS

CONNECTED

CHALLENGING

CONTEXTUALIZED

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