Teaching is hard work, and there’s precious little time to help students learn all that we hope they will learn. When we teach, we have to know the learners, choose the content we want them to learn and the skills to develop, choose the best instructional methods for achieving that, decide how to assess learning, and so forth. And we do all of this in an effort to help students learn.
One of the best ways to help students learn that is easy to overlook is to provide them with opportunities and time to think and reflect on what they have just learned. Good reflection prompts students not only to process information but also to internalize it.
But the challenge is how to do it efficiently and how to do it well. The University of Kansas Center for Service learning has some useful suggestions that could work well in a variety of situations, including course-level reflection in both onsite and online courses.
In particular, they describe the What, So what, Now what? model (which we also describe in more detail in our Learning Assessment Techniques book), the Deal Model (describe, examine, and articulate learning model), and the Gibbs Model of Reflection. For more information, check out the KU Center for Service Learning’s Web site at the following URL: https://csl.ku.edu/reflection-models
We hope you find this tool useful. As always, if you know of an interesting resource that we should feature, please drop us a line at info@kpcrossacademy.org; we will of course credit you for the information you share.