1.4 Educator’s Notes

Ask students to extend examples

When introducing the topic of reflective thinking, instruct students to look through the ‘reflective thinking in everyday life’ turn cards (H5P object) on the Reflective thinking and practice page. Then, ask students to reflect on their own experiences and think of some examples of times when they have used reflective thinking in daily life. This can be done synchronously in pairs or groups online or in person or allocated as an individual post-lesson activity, with students choosing one or two examples to share on the class discussion board.

After introducing the topic of reflective practice, the ‘Developing reflective practice’ interactive infographic is a useful tool for encouraging students to start establishing their own reflective habits. This infographic can be linked to or embedded in another digital learning environment (like an LMS).

To turn this infographic into an extended activity, instruct students to use it as a starting point for planning out how they will incorporate reflective practice into their lives. They can discuss each step of the infographic with a classmate or work individually, and then share their plans.

For example, the first step on the infographic is ‘setting aside time.’ Students can discuss when they have free time, and how much of it they can dedicate to reflective practice. The next step is, ‘find the right space,’ students can brainstorm, in pairs or larger groups, ideal locations that are accessible to them for doing reflective thinking.

Prompt deep thinking with Reflect questions

The reflection questions included in this chapter offer numerous opportunities for learners to reflect on the experiences they’ve had in their field and the reflective thinking and learning they’ve already done. Each page has a ‘Reflect’ box with prompts which encourage learners to think deeply within a reflective framework. These are basic reflection questions which learners at all levels should be able to respond to with the appropriate context and scaffolding.

Before teaching reflective writing, allow time and space for students to think about and talk about the intentional and incidental reflective writing they might have already done. Direct students to the questions in the ‘Reflect’ box on the Reflective writing page and ask them to consider the questions and then share their responses with a classmate. When they have finished discussing the questions, they can look through the ‘Type of Reflective Writing’ slideshow and might be reminded of other types of reflective writing they have done in the past.

If students cannot think of examples of times when they have done their own reflective writing, they could be asked whether they ever consume the reflective writing of others — such as blogs or personal essays.

Combine activities and Reflect boxes to create collaborative tasks 

The Reflective Practice in Context: Business page includes a ‘Reflect’ box with prompts encouraging students to reflect on their own growth in their study area. The questions double as scaffolding for the next activity on the page, which asks students to consider targeted reflective questions to help characters solve authentic business problems.

Instruct students to answer the reflection questions about themselves individually or in pairs. Then, direct them to read the situations of the three characters in the next activity and brainstorm in small or large groups reflective questions that could help the characters in each scenario. The students can then expand the accordion sections to see if their questions were similar to the example questions. Alternatively, if students need more scaffolding before forming their own questions, they can look at the example questions for each character and then add 2 or 3 of their own.

The Reflective Practice in Context: Education page includes an H5P slideshow which is a case study of a (fictional) primary teacher, Jana, showing the types of reflective practice she undertakes throughout her career – starting as a pre-service teacher, moving on to a role as a graduate teacher, and finally later down the line as an experienced teacher. This case study is authentic in its presentation of professional futures to education students.

Before exploring the case study slideshow, ask students to discuss in pairs or small groups what types of reflective activities the teacher, Jana, might need to do in each stage of her career.

Additional questions for discussion could be:

• What support do you think she will need?
• How important do you think these activities will be at each stage of her career? Why?

Ask students to explore the case study slideshow (on their own or on shared devices) to learn about the reflective practice Jana does at each stage of her career.

Ask students whether they have any thoughts or questions.

As an educator, you might like to mention how you approach your own reflective practice.

The last slide talks about Community of Practice – this is an opportunity to ask students about what types of communities of practice they could participate in. And remind them that an online forum (perhaps for their current course) is a type of CoP as well.

Use examples as scaffolding for students’ own reflective tasks

The Reflective Practice in Context: Health page includes a ‘Reflect’ box with in-depth questions that lead into a more structured reflection task, which could also be a writing activity. The task follows the What? So What? Now What? Model. Students could be instructed to choose an experience from their day, week, or semester, and place it into the provided model. This could be shared verbally, posted online with peer feedback or comments, or set as an individual, unassessed task. As this model is commonly used for reflective writing in professional placement journals, it could also be used as assessment scaffolding.

The Reflective Practice in Context: Education page includes a guided reflection activity, which helps education students reflect on their own learning experiences. This activity could be done during an allocated amount of time during a lesson or given to students as a post-lesson task.

The guided reflection is an ‘H5P documentation tool’, which prompts students to reflect on a positive and negative learning experience and steps them through the stages of analysing the experience and reflecting on what they learnt from it and how they will use this knowledge to inform their own teaching practice. Students can enter their answers into the blank fields, and then download their reflection to their device when they have finished. The answers are not stored on the page or website. As their educator, you might ask students to send you the reflections or summarise their reflections and findings in class or as a personal activity for students to practice going through the motions of intentional reflection. Suggest to students that they keep this document, as they might like to include it in a future portfolio or assessment.

Introduce AI tools as a way to prompt reflective practice

The ‘Reflect’ box on the Reflective practice in context: Business page explains the benefits of reflective prompts to kick-start the thinking process, and then asks learners to think about reflective questions which could help people get the most out of an experience or solve real-life problems.

Following an activity such as the one mentioned above, or any activity which explains the benefits of reflective prompts to guide deep thinking, AI tools can be introduced as a way to focus reflection on the key issues.

Explain to students that although the actual reflective thinking and output should come from them, AI language models can generate relevant prompts for them to respond to with their own thoughts and words.

Here are example prompts from different disciplines which an AI model could use to generate reflective questions for students.

“I am a university student. Provide me with 4 reflective questions to help me…

1. get the most out of a workshop I attended on social media marketing?”
2. develop academic and career goals in the field of public health?”
3. reflect on the lessons learnt from a group assessment I just completed in my game design course. I want to reflect on the positives and negatives of working collaboratively and how I could improve this process in the future.”
4. improve my behaviour management strategies when teaching year 8 students who seem disengaged. I am currently undertaking professional teaching practice.”

Instruct students to think of a goal they have, or a problem they would like to solve, and formulate a prompt which asks an AI language model to offer suggestions for questions to help them reflect on the situation. These prompts may need some editing to be an ideal fit for the students. When they have a set of questions relevant to their lives and goals, students can discuss their answers with classmates or use them for independent writing.

Note: While this activity is considered valuable for both independent learners and students, it has not been included in the learner-facing content of this book. This decision stems from the uncertainty regarding independent learners’ access to and knowledge of reliable, high-quality natural language processing tools.  Students should be directed to a specific AI tool that the educator has reviewed to ensure quality results.  Please note that to test this activity, Chat GPT 3.5 was used.