Something experience has taught me – sometimes the hard way – is that the things that strike you as important when they happen, or the things you remember after the event, are valuable lessons there for the learning. Sometimes we act on them in a timely manner, sometimes we only think to act on them later, and sometimes they are lost forever because we don’t think to act on them.
What I’m talking about are reflections and in this blog, I want to separate them out into three types – passive, active, and collaborative. More on that in a moment. First, I just want to say something about where the content of your reflections comes from.
You’ve done something, whether on your own or with others – you’ve had an experience. It’s not something theoretical – it’s as real as it gets, because you were there – in fact, you may have been a star of the show. Even if you only had a bit part in the show, your participation was still important, and the lessons for learning no less important. Your brain is wired – because of all your previous experiences, and because of your previous learning (whether formal or informal) – to categorise these experiences as they happen as being worthy of storing for further reflection or not.
You may remember some parts of the experience more than others. As time goes on, some more parts of the experience may drop away from conscious remembering, while some parts stubbornly remain. Even the parts you remember may start being remembered differently to how they happened. Memory is a fickle beast at the best of times…
Passive reflection – “I must remember that for next time”. That’s the extent of your conscious thinking because you’ve already moved on to the next thing you need to concentrate on. Whether that Learning Moment actually gets filed away somewhere it can be surfaced from and thought about later is arguable, because any deeper reflection is not going to take place in the near future. That’s not to say it’s lost forever, but there’s a good chance it won’t come back the next time we could benefit from it. Because we didn’t save anything more tangible as a reminder of what we needed to reflect on, there’s a good chance the Learning Moment will come back at some totally random time, not consciously connected to anything you are doing at the time and therefore be mentally filed again.
Nobody else knows that you’ve even had that thought in the first place – so there’s nobody to prompt you about what to come back to. Since you’ve got no strong links to anything, if the memory does get surfaced again, it won’t be an accurate reflection of what happened, and that’s going to limit its usefulness as a foundation for what could be done differently.
For anybody who thinks that’s a problem that doesn’t involve anybody else, it might be worth thinking again. Imagine the scenario where you are in a project team as part of your studies and one of the things you need to do is assess the performance of each of your fellow team members, because part of everybody’s final grade is made up of these peer assessments. If your reflecting was all passive, you might be having to “make up” part of those assessments. That’s not fair on them if you can’t reflect on what they actually did, and how that made you feel. Equally, it’s just as unfair if any of them end up doing that for you. The end result is that any mistakes made this time will keep on being repeated as if they were happening for the first time.
Frustrating. There has to be a better way, right…? The good news is that there is, but it is going to take a bit more deliberate effort on your part than passive reflection.
Active reflection addresses a key concern about passive reflection by introducing some formality into the process – “Let me just get that down before I forget it.” Even if these words aren’t spoken out loud so that anybody else hear them, you’ve made a commitment to yourself that you are going to take a deliberate action – you are going to record details of what happened and/or your thoughts about it, in a form that works for you, and store them somewhere you can easily get at them when you need them. If you have a specific time in mind when you are likely to need that information – maybe there’s a scheduled review built into your project timeline, all it takes is a reminder in your calendar. When you set the reminder up, make sure to include direction to where you stored your reflection notes and what file title you gave them if they are electronic – they are valuable enough that you don’t want to lose them.
Although you might have set up a reminder for when you plan to go back to them, that doesn’t mean you can’t go back to them at any other time when a relevant thought strikes you. Most times I leave the house I carry a notebook in my bag so I can jot down anything that occurs to me when it’s fresh, rather than waiting until the next time I can conveniently sit down with the original notes. I know I could record messages to myself on my phone. I don’t have an issue with talking to myself – I reckon the best people do it all the time – but the physical act of writing somehow makes those mental connections stronger, even if I don’t come back to the reflections until sometime later.
Something I’ve started doing – and this is purely a personal thing – is writing poetry. It’s fun – because it’s different. It really forces me to think about what I want to say and why those things are important to me. I’m primarily writing for my own use as a learning tool that prompts me to make changes in my thinking approach or my action approach in future situations.
While these things are – in my opinion – more beneficial; than passive reflection, they are still very personal (unless you are asking for feedback from somebody else is heading in the direction of the third reflection type – collaborative reflection.
Collaborative reflection builds on Active Reflection but takes it to a new level by having the reflecting done in the open in the team. There’s no hiding behind the cloak of anonymity when it comes to analysing team performance. You’ve all shared the collaborative experience, even if some parts of the work have been done individually, and out of sight of your fellow team members. Many collaborative project courses require, as part of the assessment process, team members to assess each other’s performance. A proportion of each member’s marks may be allocated by their peers. Team members may be better placed to assess each other’s performance than whoever is running a course simply because they see more of the reality of individual performance under various operational conditions.
The inherent drawback, though, is that such assessments are typically carried out secretly. Maybe that’s because nobody ever told learners that they didn’t have to be secret. Maybe it’s because learners didn’t ask if they had to be secret. People just made assumptions. Maybe it’s because teams hadn’t created internal cultures that made collaborative reflection an attractive option.
One issue. Multiple brains being applied to it. Multiple sets of experience being invested in a shared process and project – and this is why it’s so important that the team builds a culture where being different isn’t the same as being wrong, where learning from each other and sharing with each other become natural and unforced parts of Business As Usual. People need to trust each other to be constructive, and that trust is generated much more by what people actually do than what they say they will do. Since not everyone in the team will reach the same trust level at the same time, or for the same reasons, it’s better to accept that and live with it rather than getting all heavy with whoever doesn’t get there first or fast.
I’ve learned things about myself and how I operate when reflecting collaboratively that I either would have taken longer to discover with active reflection; or might not have discovered at all. Those things then get fed into my future performance, as well as becoming Learning Moments I can share to help others become more effective performers and reflectors.
Having said all this, my own experience facilitating collaborative Project-Based Learning has had some extremes:
- Tywo of the most effective teams I ever worked alongside did all of their reflecting collaboratively. They made the decision that’s how they would operate right from Day One, their members did more than just write or say the expected words about treating each other professionally, and they genuinely cared enough about each other to identify potential problems early and work collectively on solutions. By the way – they also delivered great finished product because they weren’t sidetracked by prosecuting any hidden agendas.
- On the other hand, I’ve worked with a few teams who looked pretty good from the outside – as long as you didn’t look too hard. Under the glossy exterior, though, some of the negative personal agendas weren’t even hidden – they were right out in the open. Some members had mentally trapped themselves into positions where there was no way they could collaborate on reflections because they were sidetracked by problems that could easily have been positive opportunities if only some of them had been prepared to keep their egos under control. These teams didn’t always deliver great finished product, some came close to delivering no finished product at all, and a couple didn’t make it to the end as teams.
On the whole, I think the benefits of collaborative reflection far outweigh the pitfalls if you are prepared to invest the time in creating the necessary culture and practicing repeatedly.
I’m interested in learning about your thinking on this topic because it’s through collaborative conversations that we can create even more valuable learning and development experiences. Please do respond with a comment and let me know what you think.
In my next blog on Thursday 4 May, I’m going to discuss a topic I know well – Imposter Sundrome (where I will explain the difference between a Syndrome and a Sundrome).
Rob Nelson Education 