5Cs for Reflection

The 5Cs for Reflection framework outlines five principles for crafting an effective reflection strategy at the course level, ensuring continuity over time. This framework helps you integrate reflection in your course following a purposeful and strategic process. 

It is designed to facilitate transformative learning by engaging students in reflexive activities that are: 

1. Continuous 
2. Connected 
3. Challenging, and 
4. Contextualized 
5. Coached

This approach offers a structured framework for incorporating reflection as a longitudinal strategy within your course. Instead of sporadic, disconnected or isolated reflection activities, intentionally crafting a reflection strategy allow for scaffolding students’ learning for a progressive development of their competences. In other words, this strategy allows students to develop and integrate relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes in a more effective and deeper manner.

Continuous

The most effective critical reflection is Continuous on two different levels: 

1. Critical reflection should be an ongoing part of a learners’ education. This allows students to keep practicing and developing new ways to understand themselves and the world. Simultaneously, they become more skilled at reflection in general. 

Tips:

• Integrate reflection throughout: Embed reflection into the course structure, offering ongoing opportunities for reflection.
• Implement focused reflection goals: Select key skills for longitudinal development throughout the course. Design reflection activities that enable students to track progress in these areas over time.
• Scaffold reflection: Provide guidance and support for students to develop their reflexive skills gradually, using prompts and feedback to help them understand and practice reflection effectively.

2. When engaging in extensive and challenging experiential learning activities, such as when working with societal partners (for example in a project-based course), it is important to maintain continuous reflection throughout the experience. This includes reflecting before, during and after the experience or collaboration with societal partners.  

Tips:  

• Before the experience: Create awareness of students’ limiting biases, beliefs, and gaps in their skills and knowledge. Also reflect on student’ expectations, motivations and goals related to the experience they are about to face. 
• During the experience: Reflect on ongoing challenges and any changes in their biases, beliefs, knowledge, motivations, goals or expectations. Encourage them to re-focus their personal goals if necessary. 
• After the experience: Reflect on the overall learning experience, focusing on main points of personal transformation and ongoing gaps, questions, or points for improvement.  

Connected

Reflection should synthesize real-life situations with intellectual understandings through connected reflection. Relate experiences to academic understandings, theories, previous knowledge, and future aspirations, for a more holistic understanding of their learning journey. Encourage students to consider the broader context—social, cultural, and ethical—within which their experiences and learning occur. This connectedness operates in two levels: on one level, experiences can illustrate theories and concepts, brining academic understandings to life. On another level, students can use frameworks, theories and concepts from the course to explain their experiences.  

Tips:

• Integrate reflection questions after experiential learning activities to help students visualize how academic concepts manifest in their experiences, enhancing real-world relevance.
• Encourage students to apply course theories and frameworks to explain their experiences, creating deeper connections between theoretical concepts and real-life situations.
• Prompt students to reflect on how their experiences contribute to academic growth, career aspirations, and personal development, facilitating a comprehensive perspective on their learning journey.
• Guide students’ reflection by offering students clear guidelines or questions to help them organize their thoughts and articulate connections between their experiences and academic understandings more effectively. 
• Facilitate guided discussions where students can explore how their experiences intersect with academic theories and concepts. Encourage them to draw parallels between their experiences and course materials to deepen their understanding.
• Encourage meta-cognition by prompting students to reflect not only on what they learned from their experiences but also on how they learned it. Encourage them to identify strategies that were effective in connecting their experiences with academic understandings, fostering self-awareness and metacognitive skills.

Challenging

One of the most important elements of effective reflection involves challenging students to engage with experience and academic understandings in a more critical way. This involves exploring alternative explanations for experiences and questioning learners’ original ideas and perceptions of events and issues. Balancing challenge with support in a safe environment is crucial for effective reflection. 

Tips: 

• Foster a safe and respectful environment: Create a space where students feel comfortable exploring unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas without fear of judgment. Emphasize the importance of mutual respect and open-mindedness in discussions.
• Encourage critical questioning: Prompt students to question their assumptions, confront biases, and challenge their initial perceptions of events or issues. Encourage them to explore alternative explanations and perspectives to deepen their understanding.
• Provide scaffolding and support: Offer guidance and support as students navigate challenging reflection tasks. Break down complex concepts or ideas into manageable parts and provide resources or examples to help them grasp unfamiliar concepts. 

Contextualized

Contextualized reflection involves aligning reflection activities with the course context in terms of design and setting, in order to create a conducive environment for meaningful reflection. This involves considering factors such as timing, format (oral or written), degree of structure and formality and the physical learning environment that is most appropriate for the reflection activity to take place. 

Tips:

• Consider course timeline: Schedule reflection activities at moments that match significant course milestones or transitions. This ensures that students have relevant experiences to reflect upon and helps reinforce connections between their experiences and course content.
• Be mindful to workload and other course activities: Avoid scheduling reflection activities during particularly stressful periods, with competing priorities, such as exam weeks or when other major assignments are due. Instead, aim for times when students can be more receptive to introspection and engagement.
• Adapt reflection format to suit the content: Consider whether oral or written reflection is more suitable for the content being discussed. For example, complex or personal topics may benefit from written reflection to allow students time to articulate their thoughts, while group discussions may be more appropriate for exploring broader themes or collaborative learning experiences.
• Flexibility and adaptability: Be open to adjusting reflection timing based on student feedback, unexpected events, or changes in the course schedule. Flexibility allows for responsiveness to student needs and ensures that reflection activities remain relevant and engaging.
• Establish an enabling physical environment: Prioritise settings that enhance student focus, engagement, and comfort during reflection. Consider quiet classrooms, outdoor spaces, or online platforms based on their suitability for fostering reflective dialogue. For instance, reflecting on university-community relations could benefit from off-campus discussions with involvement from stakeholders, while reflecting on topics like theoretical concepts or personal frustrations may require some distance from the community.

Coaching

Reflection tasks should include feedback from the instructor to help students improve their critical thinking and reflection skills. This includes providing emotional support for navigating complexity and uncertainties and guidance for students throughout the process. Coaching also involves asking critical questions that prompt students to think and giving them constructive feedback for continuous improvement. 

Tips:

• Provide Continuous Feedback on Students’ reflection: Provide ongoing feedback throughout the course, tailored to the activity, ensuring it is timely, specific, actionable, and constructive for both individual students and groups.
• Continuous Guidance: Be available to assist students throughout their reflective process, clarifying expectations and addressing concerns.
• Ask Provocative Questions: Prompt deep reflection by asking challenging questions that encourage exploration of different perspectives.
• Help navigate discomfort: Guide students through discomfort associated to uncertainties, complexities, or difficult emotions. 
• Encourage Improvement: Foster a culture of continuous improvement by helping students identify areas for growth and providing constructive feedback. 
• Provide clear guidance on reflective writing: Offer explicit instructions and examples to help students understand the difference between academic and reflective writing. Break down the components of effective reflection, such as description of events and feelings (what), critical analysis, evaluation and conclusions (so what), and next steps (now what).
• Encourage self-assessment: Empower students to assess their own reflection skills and set goals for improvement. Provide prompts or rubrics for self-evaluation, and encourage students to reflect on their progress over time.
• Facilitate peer learning: Encourage students to share their reflections with peers and provide feedback to each other. Peer interactions can offer additional perspectives and insights, deepen understanding, and foster a sense of community and collaboration within the learning experience.

References

1. Eyler, J., Giles, D.E., & Schmiede, A. (1996). A practitioner’s guide to reflection in service-learning. Vanderbilt University: Corporation for National Service. URL https://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/leduc-center-for-civic-enga…
2. Eyler, J. S. & Giles, D.E. (1999). Where’s the learning in service learning? San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.
3. 5 C’s Framework. Community-Engaged Learning [WWW Document], 2021. . University of Victoria, Teach Anywhere. URL https://teachanywhere.uvic.ca/teach-a-course/community-engaged-learning… (accessed 1.31.24).