Assignment 2 | Reflective Assignment on Critical Friends (Individual)

Overview

For this assignment, using reflection-on-action, you will describe and explore a concept, process, or activity of your choice you experienced during Unit 1 while completing Assignment 1. The topic you choose will be situated in an unfamiliar or problematic situation that happened during the completion of Assignment 1. Some examples of topics you might choose from:

• the concepts of instructional design and designing instruction;
• one phase of the design thinking process that you had not experienced before;
• a new way of connecting with your partner;
• being a critical friend; or
• responding to a critical friend.

Completing this assignment, your deliverable (a Word document) will

• Adhere to APA standards including any citations and references you may choose to back up your statements with appropriate academic literature;
• Be between 650 to 850 words excluding your Title, Headings from your chosen Model of Reflection, and References; and
• Identify in your Title which model of reflection you chose from the resource provided.

Value: 5%

Submit: your reflective writing (word docx) to the Assignment 2 dropbox in Moodle.

Due: Sunday, December 08

Assignment Context

Review the following websites:

• RRU Library Reflective Writing
• LaTrobe University Types of Reflection
• LaTrobe University Models of Reflection: Atkins & Murphy, Gibbs, Johns
• Write Online.ca Models for Reflective Writing: DEAL, Three-Stage Model, ORID Model

Choose one of the models provided to frame your reflective writing. (Atkins & Murphy, Gibbs, Johns, DEAL, Three-Stage Model or ORID Model).

As you choose your topic to complete your deliverable, remember reflection-on-action is a process to learn and develop your practices by examining your current knowledge, skills, and competencies (knowing-in-action) to a wider scrutiny of developing and learning with others in unfamiliar or problematic situations.

Optional Reading

For those who are interested or unfamiliar with terms, a little theory … with prompts that may serve to begin a draft.

Knowing-in-action refers to the practitioner’s ability to draw on their tacit knowledge to bridge a gap “artificially created between acting and thinking” (Schön, 1983, p. 50). As compared to explicit knowledge, Schön describes tacit knowledge as “implicit in our patterns of action and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing with” (p. 49). To illustrate, grade seven mathematics classroom teachers design and implement daily situations that repeat in similar patterns. They develop their tacit knowledge that automatically and intuitively assesses unfamiliar or problematic situations with students introduced to new curriculum (i.e., first class for students introducing decimals, fractions, percentages). How would you describe your knowing-in-action?

Reflection-in-action refers to the practitioner’s ability to bridge a gap between knowing-in-action and an unfamiliar or problematic situation during daily practice. Schön (1983) describes this ability as starting in the practitioner’s “perception of something troubling or promising” and evolving into “changes [the practitioner] finds on the whole satisfactory, or with the discovery of new features which gives the situation new meaning and changes the nature of the question to be explored” (p. 151). To illustrate, facilitators may consider various ways to think, to act, to do and to communicate with their clients in “the form of a literal reflective conversation” (Schön, 1983, p. 295). For the facilitator these conversations may “recast the relationship between research and practice” while “the exchange between research and practice is immediate and reflection-in-action is its own implementation” (pp. 308-309). When you and your partner went through the design thinking process, were there times when you discussed interpretations of new terminology based on your current knowledge-in-action?

Reflection-on-action refers to the practitioner’s ability to reconstruct and explore the completed activity in the unfamiliar or problematic situation. To reconstruct the completed activity requires the practitioner to describe the activity with as many details as the practitioner remembers. To explore the reconstruction requires the practitioner takes a step back from the experience, explore memories with the purpose of understanding the learning that may or may not happened and draw lessons from the experiences.

For an individual practitioner, knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action are ways of becoming aware of cognitive habits and potentially acquiring new ones. For a group or collective, these abilities may change how the group or collective approaches unfamiliar or problematic situations by using their abilities to reframe their approaches during the activity in real time or increase both their cognitive flexibility and their effectiveness when designing and developing processes for the future. They can also be very useful for understanding if others in the group consider the situation familiar, unfamiliar, or problematic; how they frame the situation; and how they rationalize their framing. Finally, they may provide effective frameworks to create a common ground for solving conflicts and working together.

Caution

Reflection-on-action may fall into a trap of becoming only a confession. A confession may become “a conforming mechanism, despite sound liberating, freeing from a burden of doubt, guilt, and anxiety (Bleakely, 2000b). Confession has a seductive quality because it passes responsibility to others” (Bolton & Delderfield, 2010, p. 14). For example, a confession might consist of which steps in the design thinking process you considered that you did right or wrong because the process was new to you or your partner and you did not have sufficient time to adequately practice. A reflection-on-action might describe the same unfamiliar situation to consider how to use what you learned from doing the process (your experience) to serve your adult learners when you ask them to trust a new process you are about to introduce.

References

Bolton, G. E. J., & Delderfield, R. (2018). Reflective Practice: Writing and Professional Development. (5^th ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner. How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith.

Assessment Rubric