Key Strategy Four: Reflect on It

The last of the four key strategies is to Reflect on It.

A reflection is when you look back at yourself as if you are looking at a mirror. The key strategy “Reflect on It” is all about looking at yourself and your Learning Journey and telling yourself a story. It is the process of thinking about what you have done, what you are planning on doing next, and what it all means to you.

The process of reflecting is when you look back and capture your feelings, experiences, thoughts, and any evidence you have produced about your Learning Journey or individual Learning Opportunities. It is your chance to explore what worked, what didn’t work, what surprised you, what made you anxious, what excited you.

A reflection is an opportunity to look back to why you decided to pursue a particular Learning Opportunity and analyze if that answer still makes sense. It is a chance to think about what role your decisions played in your journey and what it might tell you about any future decisions.

A reflection can be done in writing, audio, video, or using an interview. The format isn’t as important as the act of reflecting. It is called a reflection because you are taking an honest look at yourself, something analogous to looking in a mirror. The real audience for a reflection is yourself. In many ways, you are talking to yourself about your experience.

Here is a list of questions to help you understand some ways to reflect. These are just examples, you are welcome to come up with your own questions.

• Tell me why you decided to participate in this Learning Opportunity?
• Did this Learning Opportunity meet your expectations? In what ways?
• What were you anxious about going into this Learning Opportunity? Did this come to pass? How did you respond?
• What were you excited about going into this Learning Opportunity? Did this come to pass?
• What will you take away from this Learning Opportunity?
• What tangible, sharable things are left behind after this Learning Opportunity?
• If you could re-do your participation in this Learning Opportunity, what would you do differently?
• Does this Learning Opportunity lead you towards other Learning Opportunities or directions to pursue for your Learning Journey? In what ways?
• What did you learn about yourself because of this Learning Opportunity?
• Did you learn anything during this Learning Opportunity that changes how you see the world?
• How does participation in this Learning Opportunity contribute to the story of your Learning Journey?

These questions aren’t required; they aren’t homework. They are examples of guiding questions that might be useful to you.

Notice that the focus of these questions is you. Reflecting is about describing what the experience meant to you.

One function of the key strategy, “Reflect on It” is to get you to think about what worked, what didn’t work, what could have gone differently, and what to do next time. It is a way for you to place your experiences into the context of the rest of your life. Living a good life means examining yourself. This kind of exam is not like an end of the semester test. It is a true and honest examination.

A second function of reflecting during your Learning Journey is to help you develop a regular habit of reflecting on your life. This is a habit that will help you work towards Autonomy and Confidence. It will help you understand yourself as a learner and as a person. It will also help you understand what works for you and what gives you problems.

The third function of making a habit of reflecting is that it helps you learn. The process of looking back and analyzing a Learning Opportunity is a chance to process and deepen the learning that happened during that Learning Opportunity.

The final function, that we will talk about, is integrating your Learning Opportunity into your overall Learning Journey. Even if a Learning Opportunity didn’t go how you expected, there are things to be learned from it. Perhaps you found out that you weren’t ready for that content, yet. Maybe you discovered that you underestimated or overestimated the time required to complete something. Maybe you discovered that you can’t do everything yourself and next time it might make more sense to work with a team.

Failures, mistakes, missteps, wrong directions are all part of a Learning Journey. The reflection is a chance to rewrite the narrative. It gives you a chance to see the failures and mistakes as lessons learned. Rather than writing a mistake off as a permanent failure, you can rewrite the story and take something away from it.

Reflecting can be useful in identifying your signature strengths, interests, and motivations. It is a chance to think about what connected with you, what came easy for you, what inspired you. In reflecting you might imagine future steps on your Learning Journey. You might find a way of learning that is a good match for you, a content area that intrigues you, or skills that you want to continue working on.

There isn’t a single method to reflecting that works for everyone. You are free to create a reflection in the manner that works best for you. You are also free to invent a tool or process of your own. The important thing is to capture your thoughts and experiences related to your Learning Opportunities.

Let’s run through some methods for reflecting. Perhaps one of these will feel comfortable for you or perhaps they will trigger your own unique approach to reflecting.

You might find that you reflect best when you do it as a conversation with a friend or mentor. Even though a reflection is all about you it doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

Perhaps you want to record an interview that a friend/classmate/parent conducts with you. Maybe you turn that into a podcast or video channel where each episode is a reflection on a finished Learning Opportunity. Be creative.

Your friend will act as the interviewer and ask some guiding questions that help capture what happened on a Learning Opportunity and what you are going to take away from the experience. Your interviewer can use prepared questions or if they are already well versed in the concepts of a Learning Journey, they can be less formal and more conversational.

If you would rather not be captured on audio or video, an interview can be written down or even conducted over email or text messaging. The important thing isn’t the way it is being recorded, the important thing is having a meaningful conversation that allows you to reflect on and capture your thoughts about an experience.

Maybe you enjoy writing in a diary format and that method will enable you to best capture your thoughts. Some people enjoy the intimacy and secrecy of writing to a diary. If this is true for you, use that as a manner of capturing your thoughts about your experiences on your Learning Journey.

While some methods of reflecting are directly tied to the end of a single Learning Opportunity, a diary is more commonly tied to reflecting on the end of a day or a week. You can use either approach.

You could write a diary entry along the lines of, “Dear Diary, I just finished my art project …”

Or “Dear Diary, this week I was working on …”

Whether you are structuring your diary entry around the completion of a Learning Opportunity or around the passage of a day or a week or a month, the important part is that you are examining your choices and your experiences, you are thinking about what worked and what didn’t work, you are finding meaning, and you are imagining your next steps.

Maybe you do best with a fixed set of questions and you systematically answer those questions one at a time at the end of a Learning Opportunity.

There are some advantages to answering the same questions over time. For one, it is simple. The questions are already created, your job is to just go through them an honestly answer.

In addition to being simple, this method creates a structured record to allow you to directly compare and contrast your answers over time. You can easily see patterns develop or changes that occur because you are always examining your Learning Opportunity using the same set of questions.

If this method makes sense for you, take a look in Section Four for some templates you can use or adapt for capturing your reflections.

When people go on a vacation they sometimes keep a scrapbook of their adventures. Photos, mementos, merch. A scrapbook serves as a storytelling and memory tool, it helps the traveler capture and keep a reminder of what happened. You can use a similar approach to reflecting on your Learning Journey. Collect and organize the scraps that help you tell a story about your experiences.

Take photos of your internships and travels. Save the writing and drawing you are doing. Use the Learn by Creating method so that evidence of learning is created naturally as you go.

Hopefully your Learning Journey is full of memorable moments, important lessons, and meaningful experiences. Human memory is fleeting. The process of capturing, re-remembering, integrating, and reflecting on an experience is one way of making a memory last. We take photos and make photo albums to help us remember events, people, places. They are extensions of our memory.

We capture events on video so that we can rewatch at some point down the road. We write diaries to help us remember and process our thoughts. We tell stories with each other to refresh and relive memories. We buy mementos, t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats as a way of capturing the experience of a trip or an event so that it stays with us in some form.

If you have ever sat around looking at a photo album reminiscing with a friend or relative or asked someone about a knick knack from a trip and suddenly watched their memories come back to them, you have experienced how the memories come flooding in and the stories start flowing. You might recall things you haven't thought of in a long time. You suddenly start integrating old events into the present world. It gives you an opportunity to not only remember but also to reconsider and recalibrate.

A scrapbook can serve as an external storage mechanism. After all, your experience of an individual Learning Opportunity will soon take a backseat to new experiences and new Learning Opportunities. One way of storing those experiences is to leave behind a mental trigger in the form of Evidence of Learning. The evidence isn't just meant for an external audience as proof of your learning, it is also meant as a trigger for your own memories. As a way of helping you integrate the learning you just did into your overall Learning Journey.

Now let’s talk about how you are going to tell the story of your Learning Journey. That is the subject of section three.