Structuring the Reflection Process

Balancing Challenge and Support

Cognitive development literature suggests that many students may not be ready to adequately address the complexity of service-learning problems. Thus a key question that faculty must consider while designing reflection is: How can reflection be designed to challenge students while providing appropriate support?

Examples of how the need to balance challenge and support affects the design of reflection are given below:

Frequent reflection and timely feedback may be necessary to provide a balance between challenge and support. An end of semester reflection activity will not provide faculty information about areas where students may need additional guidance or prompts to stimulate further reflection.

Accordingly, certain forms of reflection (e.g. journals, portfolios, logs) can be used in addition to end of semester reports or presentations. Such reflection activities help faculty monitor student progress weekly, and allow faculty time to intervene and support students as needed.

Faculty may also need to provide an adequate structure to ensure that reflection activities are challenging but not too far beyond students' abilities.

As noted in previous sections, faculty must consider the context in which problems arise in order to provide the appropriate challenge and support. Of particular importance is the students' intellectual development and their ability to contextualize issues. Cognitive development literature offers guidance to help faculty understand their students current efforts at problem-solving. Faculty must understand students' problem-solving abilities in order to effectively balance challenge and support during reflection.

For example, the section on student intellectual development noted that most undergraduate students operate at level 4 of the reflective judgment model. Such students have difficulty understanding perspectives other than their own. Accordingly, faculty can structure the reflection process as follows:

¨ If students have difficulty understanding other perspectives, use reflection to provide opportunities to examine problems from multiple perspectives. Several activities can be used for this purpose including (1) class discussion where students share their experiences, (2) a journal with feedback from the professor to encourage consideration of other perspectives, (3) team conferences with the instructor, and (4) discussions with community partners.

¨ Students may react negatively if they are confronted with perspectives that are not congruent with their own for the first time during the project. Thus it is important to provide opportunities for analyzing unstructured problems before the service learning experience to help students understand the need for considering and dealing with multiple perspectives.

Another important feature of the reflective judgment model is that it can help faculty understand students' problem-solving abilities in terms of a problem-solving process. To develop students' problem-solving skills, faculty should design assignments that address various elements of the problem-solving process such as framing the problem, identifying and evaluating various alternatives, etc. Thus, faculty can design assignments that encourage students to:

¨adequately frame the problem by examining various issues related to people, organizational structure and processes, resources, etc., that must be considered in solving the problem
¨ gather appropriate evidence,
¨ identify alternative solutions to a problem, and
¨ choose an appropriate solution from these alternatives and justify recommendations based on evidence

The literature also suggests that the skills involved in problem-solving develop sequentially. That is, students must be able to frame problems effectively before they can identify ways to gather evidence or identify alternatives. Thus learning goals must reflect student intellectual development. For example, if most students are at level 4, goals related to framing problems must be addressed before other steps in the problem-solving process.