Most of us would agree that reflection is an important part of the learning process. The hard part about reflective exercises is making students think about course content rather than their feelings about it.
One of my colleagues in philosophy uses an exercise that I’ve adapted for a course I’m teaching now. Five times during the semester students write a one-page reflection on previous reading assignments and class discussions. Students can attempt to clarify a particular point made in class, critique someone else’s point, wonder about the implications of a particular idea, or consider the relationship between one author’s writing and another. Students must raise a question (or questions) as part of each paper. These questions can go in the direction of the individual student’s choosing, but they should be clear, concise, and original.
Here’s where things get interesting: students post their questions online for review by their peers. The questions that are regarded as the “best” (however defined) by the students are used for additional classroom debate. The process of reflection moves from being solely internal (where I am the only other person who learns what a student is thinking) to being shared and evaluated among peers. At the same time, students are generating a bank of exam questions that I can draw from. If the questions I include on an exam have already been discussed, there’s no need for me to set aside additional class time for an exam review session.
Perseus prepares to engage Medusa in a self-reflection exercise . . .
Neat exercise. I’ve done pieces of this but never the whole thing together: in my seminars students write 2 page reflections every week on the readings and pose discussion questions at the end which i use in class, but they don’t post these for everyone; in some lower division classes I have students write questions and share them, using the best for the exam, but there is not evaluative component. I really like this exercise as a core part of a course. Thanks for sharing it!