What is Reflection?

Writing a Reflective Cover Memo

On Reflection and Pedagogy

What I'll mean in this text when I say reflection will be 1) the processes by which we know what we have accomplished and by which we articulate accomplishment and 2) the products of those processes (eg, as in, "a reflection"). In method, reflection is dialectical, putting multiple perspectives into play with each other in order to produce insight. Procedurally, reflection entails a looking forward to goals we might attain, as well as a casting backward to see where we have been. When we reflect, we thus project and review, often putting the projections and the reviews in dialogue with each other, working dialectically as we seek to discover what we know, what we have learned, and what we might understand. When we reflect, we call upon the cognitive, the affective, the intuitive, putting those into play with each other: to help us understand how something completed looks later, how it compares with what has come before, how it meets stated or implicit criteria, our own, those of others. Moreover, we can use those processes to theorize from and about our own practice, making knowledge and coming to understandings that will themselves be revised through reflection. As Donald Schon suggests and as we shall see, "from our reflection upon the particular, we learn about the prototypic" (1995:85).

Reflection, then, is the dialectical process by which we develop and achieve, first specific goals for learning; second, strategies for reaching those goals; and third, means of determining whether or not we have met those goals or other goals. Speaking generally, reflection includes the three processes of projection, retrospection (or review), and revision. For writing, it likewise includes three processes:

1. goal-setting, revisiting , and refining
2. text-revising in the light of retrospection
3. the articulating of what learning has taken place, as embodied in various texts as well as in the processes used by the writer.

Accordingly, reflection is a critical component of learning and of writing specifically; articulating what we have learned for ourselves is a key process in that learning--in both school learning and out-of-school learning (although I'm not sure the two can be--or should be--separated).

From Kathleen Yancey, Reflection in the Writing Classroom, U of Utah, 1998: p. 6-7.

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