Reflective Teaching and Learning: Why We Should Make Time to Think

The demanding, competitive, and output-centred culture of higher education often trickles into our teaching where focus is on the summative product rather than the process of learning. Reflection is one means of encouraging deeper and richer understandings during the learning process, and is a form of purposeful thinking that can be used to explore complex problems, anticipate outcomes, or be used on unstructured ideas to gain clarification (Larrivee & Cooper, 2006; Ryan, 2013). Reflection can be applied in higher education to enable a learner to grow intellectually, professionally and personally (Rogers, 2001; Ryan, 2011). The process of reflection allows the learner to seek out personal meanings and identifications with the learning material and create connections with the ideas and content already known (Ash & Clayton, 2009). This process fosters further learning, as the individual develops new concepts, relationships, and perspectives and also reinforces their current understandings through this feedback system (Rogers, 2001). This workshop engages participants in a pre-facilitation activity on reflective writing used to represent the reflection process and to further illustrate what reflection is, how it can be used as a learning skill, and how it can be assessed.