Structured Reflection

To become a successful professional you need to take responsibility for your own continued learning. As adults, we all learn in different ways: some of us learn best through reading and observing; some learn best through active participation with others; and some learn best through practical experience. There is no one correct way to learn, so it’s important that you find out what works best for you. A technique we will formally use is called structured reflection. Structured reflection just means thinking about and evaluating your experiences in a way that leads to positive change and growth. When you reflect on your experiences in a mindful way, you can turn every experience into a learning experience. We will use reflection as a means of exploring approaches to understanding situations and developing solutions.

Reflection helps designers to learn from their experiences, to integrate and co-ordinate different aspects of a design situation, to judge the progress of the design process, to evaluate interactions with the design context, and to plan suitable future design activities. In addition, structured reflection can help designers to take balanced design decisions that are based on both rationality and intuition. Structured reflection has the advantage that reflection is performed regularly during a design process and that it is based on a systematic approach. This should help to detect and correct deviations from the design goal early and to decrease the chance of overlooking important aspects and viewpoints. Altogether, structured reflection should result in an increased effectiveness and efficiency of design processes. [Reymen, I.M.M.J., Melby, E. (2001, October) Improving Design Processes through Structured Reflection: A Prototype Software Tool, SAI Report 2001/2, Stan Ackermans Institute, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.]

Assignment

You are to email me a structured reflection after every class. The reflections count as part of the participation grade. The basics of reflections are given under Basics.

The basic purpose of a reflection is to contemplate a situation or a problem. Following Rolfe's idea, you need to ask three questions: What, So What, and Now What? You may pick on something that was said in class or something that you read in preparation. The "So What" is the reflection piece. Lastly, I want you to write down what you learned from the exercise.

Basics

[Rolfe G, Freshwater D, Jasper M. Critical Reflection in Nursing and the Helping Professions: a User’s Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2001] Gary Rolfe proposed a simple model for structured reflection based on the first three questions below (I added the fourth):

1. What is the Issue?
2. So What?
3. Now What?
4. What Have I Learned?
   

Description of experience

1. What is the ‘here and now’ experience?
2. What essential factors contributed to this experience?
3. What were the significant background factors to this experience?

Reflection

1. What was I trying to achieve?
2. Why did I act the way I did? What influenced my action?
3. What were the consequences of my actions for: myself, colleagues?
4. How did I feel about this experience when it was happening?
5. Why did I feel that way?
6. How did the colleagues feel about it?
7. Why did I think they felt that way?
8. How did I know this?
9. What other choices did I have?
10. What would have been the consequences of those other choices?

Learning

1. How do I now feel about this experience?
2. How could I have been more effective?
3. What would I do now, faced with a similar situation?
4. What have I learned from the experience?