SLS-9e1a - Teachers’ Perception of Reflection - What the data tells us

Everyone agrees that reflection is critical in service-learning. For many teachers, however, it is also one of the most difficult topic to teach.  One of the reasons is that the concept of reflection is not well understood, despite its importance and continued attention. To understand better the role of reflection in service-learning and its impact, we set out on a project to better understand how teachers perceive of reflection in the first place.  

In-depth interviews uncovered common tendencies as well as concerns about handling reflection in service-learning courses. We devised a framework to map teachers’ conception of reflection onto the goal of transformative service-learning. From the data set, we identify four conceptual domains echoing varying conceptions of reflection in literature: reflection as (1) transformative learning, (2) mindful practice, (3) evaluation exercise, and (4) articulated thinking – with the most popular being evaluation exercise and transformational learning.

The teachers who participated in this study are faulty members who taught service-learning at the university between 2012 and 2017. Academic departments at the university are classified according to Biglan’s classification of academic disciplines.  Faculty members who have taught a service-learning subject at least twice are invited for an interview.  We aimed to interview 12 teachers from the “hard” disciplines and another 12 from the “soft” disciplines.  We also aimed at an even split between more experienced (more than 3 years of experience in SL) and less experienced teachers.  

The interviews took place in the first half of 2017, each lasting for approximately an hour. Teachers were asked specifically what they understand by the term “reflection” and its importance in service-learning.  Based on analysis of the interviews, we identified 4 major characterisations of reflection from the teachers.  The first two relate to the function or purpose of reflection, either leaning towards being (y-d) an assessment tool for the teachers, or (y-u) a learning process primarily for het benefit of the student.  The other two relate to the substance of the activity, as in, whether the content was focused on a task-oriented (x-l) program review, or (x-r) a person-oriented critical cognition of personal values, stereotypes and beliefs.  

Using the functional and content dimensions as orthogonal axes, we contract a framework to categorise the teachers’ perceptions of reflection.  Moving along the x-axis progresses from a primarily practical focus on the task (to the left) or the project to a potentially more transformative exercise that allows students to gain deeper personal meaning from their experience (to the right). Moving along the y-axis represents a similar continuum from seeing the reflection activity in a very instrumental light (down) to treating reflection as a student-focused pedagogy for learning (up).  We are able to find a location for each and every subject in the framework that feels about right.  We also found that the majority of the subjects can be placed neatly into one of the four quadrants.  These are represented by dots in the diagram. There are quite a few subjects that seem to belong to two quadrants.  Fortunately, in all such cases, the two quadrants are neighbours of each other, and we can represent such cross-quadrant subjects as lines linking up the two quadrants.  There is no subject that belongs to two quadrants that do not share a common border - this is an indication that the framework is perhaps appropriate for a useful categorisation.