Tags
activities, experience, Learning, projects, reflecting, reflection
I read a quote about learning. It made me stop and think. I thought, “Yeah, that’s right!” Then I thought, “No, I don’t think that is really accurate.” Then I started thinking about it. The quote? This one:
“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey
Think about it. Do you have to reflect on some experience to learn from it? Or do we just learn by doing?
There is a long history of the saying, “Experience is the best teacher,” and several versions of it, such as, “Experience is the best teacher, and the worst experiences teach the best lessons,” by Jordan Peterson, and “Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters,” by Harry Callahan.
But back to my question, do we have to reflect or only experience?
My reaction that reflection is not needed comes from my years as an educator planning my students’ learning experiences in my courses. I wanted to help assure that they learned, and I wanted to be sure I had some “proof” of that learning or measure it somehow. So I required “reflections” or reactions of some sort after many projects. These ‘forced’ the student to think about what they did, how they did it, why they did it that way, and similar issues. Then they wrote it down following the guidelines I outlined for the reflection (some specific topics/issues to discuss, length of the reflection, etc.).
The reflection became another assignment. I was not always so sure that it was a learning experience instead of another paper to write; something formulaic rather than thoughtful rumination.
I also came to this conclusion based on my own experience. I’ve learned from doing projects and have not written a reflection piece about it. But, I thought, “Yes, I did reflect on it. I thought about what went right and wrong and why, what I could have done differently or should do differently next time for a better result or an easier process.
I reflected, therefore I learned.
Now, I have to continue to try to have my students reflect on the experience to learn about it. Not to learn how to get through an assignment easier with a decent grade, but to learn about the experience or process itself. What did they learn about the thing that mattered to the goals of the course?
I can’t force my students to learn. I can provide the opportunity and experiences to help them if they want to learn. I’m still working on the motivation aspect of education – a different blog post, I’m sure, but a big on I’m not ready to tackle just yet.
What have you reflected on lately? (What have you been learning?) It certainly goes beyond the classroom, but we educators try to bring it all in, or at least tie it all together.