Facilitating Integrative and Lifelong Learning

How can reflection be used to facilitate integrative and lifelong learning outcomes ?

How might you integrate various reflection activities that work together to develop the students' ability to evaluate their experiences and to build their confidence in taking responsibility for their own learning? Begin with basic prompts that establish the context of learning, i.e., questions that ask who, what, when, and where the learning happens. Next, build upon this contextual foundation, providing more thought-provoking prompts, i.e., questions that address the significance of the experience, or support "why it matters." Finally, provide reflective prompts that elicit deep thinking and synthesis (lifelong and integrative learning), encouraging students to transfer what they are learning to new contexts. These deep-level reflections can be more successfully addressed when they are supported by a scaffold of interim reflections, i.e., "capping" the experiences already articulated in earlier reflections.

Scaffolding Reflection Activities

In short, the organization of deep reflection models genres (such as IMRAD) with which your students are already familiar.

For additional scaffolding ideas, see also University Writing Center Scaffolded Assignments.