We found 209 results that contain "reflection"

Finishing up the academic year isn’t the same flavor as past years. We’ve had a taste of a much different year and there’s no better time than the moment to reflect on what was accomplished, set aside, or re-imagined. With the spring sun comes a deep breath out, then pause, and inhale hope for the opportunities ahead.
Start with a 3 Breath Reset
At the start of each session of the Living in a Daring Way course, Lisa Laughman helps participants pause for a three breath reset. This practice is common in mindfulness-based stress reduction courses. Try this short technique to help you refocus and recenter yourself.

First breath: focus on your breath coming in and leaving your body.
Second breath: notice your tension in your body on the inhale. On the exhale take a more relaxed position.
Third breath: on the inhale try to connect to your deepest wisest self. On the exhale stay with your deepest wisest self and acknowledge that part of yourself.

Learn from Lisa Laughman, LMSW & ACSW in Health4U and the Employee Assistance Program. 
Season with Gratitude
“Throughout my career, I have found myself committed to appreciating the contributions of my colleagues, and the communities we served. Whether it was uplifting the stories of others or building structures to support gratitude sharing, giving thanks and holding space to appreciate others has been a constant,” said learning designer Makena Neal in a recent piece, Gratitude and the Culture of Care.
There’s evidence to support the importance of gratitude in the workplace. Practicing gratitude has significant impacts on positive affective well-being, can also promote kindness and generosity, and highlights our connection to one another. Moreover, triggers that inspire state gratitude, such as letters of appreciation, as well as institutionalized gratitude have been found to be predictors of job satisfaction.  
At MSU, you can formally Thank an Educator. You can also nominate your supervisor/administrator for this year’s Outstanding Supervisor Award by July 31, 2022. Anywhere you are you can send an email, verbally share your gratitude or send a token of appreciation. A small amount of gratitude can make a huge impact. So… who will you thank today?
Reflect on Accomplishments
Take a look at your personal accomplishments - not just the big hurray moments, but the moments of holding peace, wrapping up a long-tail project, and even finishing a very hard academic year. Sometimes survival is a success. Life isn’t just about reaching higher and higher peaks, sometimes it's about moving through the valleys, and just reaching a resting place is an endeavor worth honoring.
You can choose to track your professional success 
Jaimie Hutchison of the WorkLife Office provided this insight:
Often, after speaking with people, I learn how much more they actually have to offer than what shows up on their resume or LinkedIn profile. Here in the WorkLife Office, I do career consultations for faculty and staff. I have worked with faculty, executives, and staff members of all levels. In the end, the same advice and encouragement comes out:

By thinking through your impact and accomplishments, you can have a better sense of your contribution to your workplace.
You can have a better sense of yourself.
You can reflect on things you have done where you used your skills to the best of your ability.
You can reflect on projects or positions where you felt “meh” and it wasn’t the best fit for you.
You can also reflect on what skills, experience, and abilities you have that are not getting utilized. 

The Three Levels of Praxis: A Model for Reflection on Teaching 
Written by E. Cuevas, educator in WRAC, the article draws on what Paulo Freire called praxis, or reflection and action. “A belief in praxis accepts that we are both instructors and learners; we have much to learn from our students. Engaging in reflection is an important part of figuring out how to align your goals, with your teaching, with your research, and your place in your institution. In this post, I will continue to reflect on my personal positioning to offer a model for reflection and I will do this by meditating on my positionality on three levels: the personal, the classroom, and the institutional,” wrote E. Cuevas
 
Give it Time
The Well-being at Work Guide sheds insights on taking time away from work, in the forms of breaks, vacation time, or strengthening boundaries around employees’ workdays, is important. Taking breaks throughout the workday has benefits for both the employee and the organization, but many employees often neglect to take them. Skipping breaks can lead to faster burnout and higher stress levels. Employees stepping away from work for a few minutes increases their productivity, job satisfaction, mental health and wellbeing, in addition to restoring their motivation (Kohll, 2018; Selig, 2017). 
Taking a break from work increases focus when employees return to work, thus improving their productivity. Additionally, taking breaks relieves some stress, which helps employees’ mental health and wellbeing. These factors contribute to increased job satisfaction (Kohll, 2018). 

Learn from Nature
Nature can positively affect employees. There is evidence that time spent outdoors boosts people's wellbeing, and even five minutes of time in nature can improve mental health. Spending time outside benefits people because breathing fresh air increases oxygen intake and allows the lungs to work at their full capacity (Sandborn, 2018).  Exposure to vitamin D from the sun boosts people's moods, too. Time outside also can reduce employees’ chronic stress, physical and social stressors. These benefits are at their strongest when experiencing 21 to 30 minutes of nature time (Hunter, Gillespie, & Chen, 2019).

Beronda Montgomery talks "Lessons from Plants"
Watch the Replay 
Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They “know” what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment.

Grow in Your Own Way
However you reflect, disconnect, recharge and rejuvenate this summer; do it in the way that works best for you. Try new things or shut out the world for a few hours at a time. Explore new skills, areas, and ideas, or retreat to your own quiet place to let your mind wander. Plot your next year or reflect solidly on the past. Remember all the challenges you’ve overcome, the people you met, and the opportunities you’ve discovered.

Written by Erik Skogsberg
Assessing Your Teaching
In the push to end the semester, it’s tempting to completely disconnect from all that happened in your classes as soon as you submit grades. Now, we certainly hope everyone has a restful break, but we also hope you’ll set aside some time to assess your teaching before next semester begins. This assessment is a crucial piece of your overall development as a teacher and can greatly impact your work with students next semester. In our closing blog post for the semester, we want to provide you with some suggestions for reflecting on fall semester: taking stock of where you’ve been with students this semester and using that information to guide your decisions next semester.
Learning From Your Final Assessment
We can’t underscore enough how important assessment is in teaching and learning. It’s the means with which you gather the necessary info you need on student learning and make evidence-based decisions on where to go next. Now, in ending the semester, you have the focal point of your final assessments to provide evidence out of which to base future teaching decisions. And whether you’re teaching the same course or a completely different one, there’s still much to be gained from this kind of reflection. To help your reflection in connection to your final assessments, we offer the following questions:
Three Questions for Reflecting Forward
1) Did you meet your learning objectives?: You hopefully set out work in your course with some specific overall learning objectives for students. Did students meet them? What evidence do you have in your final assessments? In what areas were they strongest? In what areas did they struggle? In meeting or not meeting your learning objectives, you have some clear areas of focus and further development. And by connecting back across your objectives and final assessments, you can take stock of what you believe worked well for teaching and learning and what did not.
2) What instructional practices worked best?: Think back to the instructional practices and activities connected to the strongest and weakest areas of your final assessments.  Perhaps students struggled most with synthesizing certain elements of your course or analyzing a key text. Or maybe you realized students just weren’t able to adequately back up the claims they made in the final paper as you hoped. What instructional activities did you design in order to support them? By identifying these specific practices and activities, you can begin to address any common patterns or clear areas for future focus.
3) Where do you need to grow next semester?: Answering this final question–in light of the previous two above–can send you into next semester with clear teaching goals and areas for your own development. If you’re teaching the same course again, then we’d suggest you start proactively identifying and adjusting areas of your course you know need to work better. If you’re teaching a completely different course, you can still make sure you’re focusing in on similar learning outcomes and/or areas of instructional practice even if the content isn’t the same. For help, in addition to seeking out the assistance of other instructors in your college, we’d encourage you to take advantage of the digital resources we offer on the Inside Teaching MSU website, the upcoming #iteachmsu chats, and The Graduate School and MSU Academic Advancement Networkworkshops. We regularly offer resources and opportunities on our blog, as well as via social media and through in-person workshops. If you aren’t already engaged with us across those spaces, perhaps make that part of your development goals for next semester.
We’d like to know: What process do you use to reflect and build on your teaching between semesters? Where do you find the best support for areas you want to improve? Share your thoughts on social media using “#iteachmsu” or in the comments section below.

Photo Credit: Teach/Learn/Duane Schoon/CC 2.0/Cropped

You may wish to add and include reflections in your dossier or portfolio. Here is a brief infographic that offers some guidance. While this is intended for a medical education audience or health professions education, the concepts and organization of thoughts is useful across disciplines. Sarraf-Yazdi, Shiva & MD, MEHP. (2021). Perks, Processes, and Pitfalls of Reflective Practice. Academic Medicine, 96, 769. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000003864

Photo by STIL on Unsplash
 
Assessing Your TeachingAt the end of a semester, we know it’s tempting to completely disconnect from all that happened in your classes as soon as you submit grades. While we certainly hope everyone has had a chance to recharge, we also hope you’ll set aside some time to assess your teaching before next semester begins.This practice is a crucial piece of your overall development as an educator and can greatly impact your work with the next group of students. Below are some suggestions for reflecting on the past semester: taking stock of where you’ve been with students this semester and using that information to guide your decisions next semester.
Learning From Your Final AssessmentWe can’t underscore enough how important assessment is in teaching and learning. It’s the means with which you gather the necessary info you need on student learning and make evidence-based decisions on where to go next. Now, in ending the semester, you have the focal point of your final assessments to provide evidence out of which to base future teaching decisions. And whether you’re teaching the same course or a completely different one, there’s still much to be gained from this kind of reflection. To help your reflection in connection to your final assessments, we offer the following questions:
Three Questions for Reflecting Forward:1) Did you meet your learning objectives? 
You hopefully set out work in your course with some specific overall learning objectives for students. Did students meet them? What evidence do you have in your final assessments? In what areas were they strongest? In what areas did they struggle? In meeting or not meeting your learning objectives, you have some clear areas of focus and further development. 
And by connecting back across your objectives and final assessments, you can take stock of what you believe worked well for teaching and learning and what did not.
 2) What instructional practices worked best?
Think back to the instructional practices and activities connected to the strongest and weakest areas of your final assessments.  Perhaps students struggled most with synthesizing certain elements of your course or analyzing a key text. Or maybe you realized students just weren’t able to adequately back up the claims they made in the final paper as you hoped. What instructional activities did you design in order to support them? By identifying these specific practices and activities, you can begin to address any common patterns or clear areas for future focus.3) Where do you need to grow next semester?
Answering this final question–in light of the previous two above–can send you into next semester with clear teaching goals and areas for your own development. If you’re teaching the same course again, then we’d suggest you start proactively identifying and adjusting areas of your course you know need to work better. If you’re teaching a completely different course, you can still make sure you’re focusing in on similar learning outcomes and/or areas of instructional practice even if the content isn’t the same. For help, in addition to seeking out the assistance of other instructors in your college, we’d encourage you to take advantage of the digital resources we offer on the #iteachmsu Commons website (iteach.msu.edu), and The Graduate School and MSU Academic Advancement Network workshops. We regularly offer resources and opportunities on our blog, as well as via social media and through in-person workshops. If you aren’t already engaged with us across those spaces, perhaps make that part of your development goals for next semester.

Community engagement can be a powerful tool for both connecting classroom learning to real life experiences and supporting community change efforts. In this our last post on community engagement in teaching, we want to address two questions: : 1) How can teachers attend to ethical concerns that may arise throughout community engagement projects?; and 2) How can teachers integrate routine reflection as a strategy to assess student learning throughout community engagement projects? Reflective activities create a critical space for us to capture the ethical issues arising with students and to reflect on our own ethical practice as instructors for community engaged courses. And we could not discuss ethical concerns without students being able to reflect about specific issues. For this last post in our community engagement series, we will focus on the ways we made sure to support student learning by exploring potential ethical issues and creating regular reflective opportunities.
Ethical Considerations When Engaging Communities
The ethical issues you must attend to are both community- and student-focused. Returning to  the community engagement spectrum from our previous two posts (Preparation and Implementation), the ethical considerations broaden as students become more immersed in communities. For example, we both had concerns about communities being exploited for the sake of students’ learning. To address this concern, Jenny (service learning) spent time with community partners prior to her course to gain an understanding about what would make the project meaningful to them and built mechanisms into the course to attend to those needs. Katie (photovoice) built guidelines for students’ photos into her photovoice rubric, spent time in class talking to students about ethical photography, and encouraged  students to ask questions they may have about their photos.
We both felt it would be unethical for students to engage with communities without first considering the impact their own identities and expectations on their work. We made sure students thought about privileged and oppressed identities, assumptions they hold  about communities that they might engage with, and how they might manage or interpret challenging experiences. Overall, we focused students on reflecting as an ethical imperative to ensure the experience worked well for community members and for students, but also as an assessment process to enhance student learning.
Reflection for Learning in Community Engagement
Reflection can be a useful tool for both students and instructors to more fully understand learning during community engagement activities. We both used multiple tools for reflection based in course objectives, both formal and informal, and creatively responding to the unexpected elements of this work. Below, we highlight how you can prepare to incorporate reflection into your community engagement efforts, along with some helpful tips for doing so that we derived from our own work
A) Reflect Flexibly Toward Course Objectives
If you’ve already elected to use community engagement as part of your course, you should consider how it will match up with course objectives. This can be very direct if you’re reading an article or bringing in a speaker about a particular topic, but may require more scaffolding if you’re integrating an experience like photovoice, service learning, or study abroad. Here, it’s essential to anticipate multiple student experiences of community engagement work. Make sure that reflection prompts are broad enough so that all students can participate, but still focused enough they are reflecting back toward the overall project and course objectives. For example, in Katie’s course, she had a full class dedicated to reflection incorporating definitions, examples and an assignment using a reflection tool called the “Ladder of Inference.” These activities taught students how to identify their own learning and thinking changed about particular issues, preparing to do deeper reflection in their photovoice project, and further connecting back to the overall course objectives of examining how concepts of power and oppression relate to social issues.
B) Reflect Informally and Formally
It’s essential to provide a spectrum of ways students can reflect on their learning. This spectrum builds a comprehensive culture of reflection in your course and provides multiple windows into student learning during community engagement and beyond. Providing informal reflection spaces help students build up to more formal, graded reflections on their work. These informal reflections could include short discussions, posing quick questions to students after explaining something, and/or having students keep a journal of their thoughts during community engagement work. And eventually building formal reflection into the course provides a culminating space for student to think about their learning across community engagement experiences. Final papers or projects can  provide a powerful picture of what students experienced and continue to validate both the community engagement work and the importance of regular reflection in connection to it. Whatever mixture of formal and informal reflection you decide on, make sure to integrate the results of the student reflection into your instruction moving forward. Through lectures and learning activities, demonstrate you’ve heard and are thinking about what students said.
C) Reflect Creatively
Reflective activities and assignments don’t have to fit within the bounds of traditional assessment strategies. There is plenty of room for creativity in setting up these activities.For example, Katie hosted a photovoice gallery in her classroom where students could explore their peers’ interpretations of the activity. Then, students had the opportunity to engage in discussion to reflect on what they’ve learned as a group from participating in the process. Doing this in both a big group and individually can speak to multiple learning styles. It also provides a space for students to generate new understandings of their experiences.
D) Reflect on the Unexpected
Realize that reflections may go beyond the scope of your course objectives and be prepared to facilitate learning that departs from expected directions. Community engagement can be both messy and beautiful. Leave space for unpacking the complexities.
We hope this series of blog posts helped remove some of the mystique regarding community engagement in the classroom. Getting students to connect course topics to what is going on around them can be rewarding and exciting! As you continue to consider incorporating community engagement into your own work, what ethical concerns do you need to consider? How important is reflection in your course? What reflective activities could you do to prepare your students for engagement and to assess their learning? We are always looking for new ideas so please share with us in the comments below!
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gregory K. and Lawlor, J. Building Community Engagement into Your Course: Ethics and Reflections. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

This article is meant to be the final piece of the main content in the Approaches to translingual pedagogy playlist. The aim is to provide educators with reflection questions to help build a bridge between the content presented here and their everyday practice. How might it change your current teaching, were you to frame your class, so that the student’s languages and cultures might be seen as assets, rather than something that (potentially) gets in the way of your students’ learning?   What would have to change and why?  How might you make these changes?

One of the possible ways to have students work on a course project throughout a semester is to have periodic concept map assignments. Journals were framed as homework assignments to be done individually. The purpose of these assignments was to help students prepare for their final project in ISB202.
 
Journal Assignment #1 Overview: What do you think regarding de-extinction as a conservation tool? Which evidence do you find most persuasive? Have your views changed or been reinforced by the TEDTalks? To address these questions, you will create a reflection. A reflection incorporates a critical and personal reflection of an issue, supported with evidence. What matters is what you think, which is highly personal and unique, but your opinion is based on your understanding of the evidence and arguments.
 
Each journal assignment will be a model that includes a position statement and supporting evidence (except for journal assignment #2, which is an annotated bibliography). The models will be concept maps (see example below). There will be three “levels” to the concept map. 1) The first “level” will be a position statement, such as “De-extinction should be used as a conservation tool.” 2) Then the next level will be evidence supporting the position statement. Each piece of evidence will be in its own bubble. For this journal assignment, the evidence will be primarily from the TEDTalks viewed in class. Aim for at least three pieces of evidence. 3) Finally, the third level will include details about each piece of evidence. For this journal assignment, consider which pieces of evidence or examples are most persuasive and additional questions or clarifications that may need to be considered with each piece of evidence. Aim for twice as many details as pieces of evidence overall (e.g., one piece of evidence may contain three details and another may have only one)
 
For a full description of this assignment, including the grading rubric, check out the attachment. You can also check out full descriptions of the annotated reference list journal assignment and the following journals for the semester.

Title: Incorporating Reflective Practices in Classrooms: Our Learning Assessment ModelPresenters: Salomon Rodezno, Dustin Petty (Bailey Scholars Academic Advisor, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources); Sarah Prior (Bailey Scholars Program Director, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources; Sociology Department, College of Social Science); Eric Abaidoo (Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources); Salomón Rodezno (Educational Administration, College of Education) A.L. McMichael (Director, LEADR; History and Anthropology, College of Social Science); Harlow Loch (Accounting Department, Eli Broad College of Business); Reva Durr (Educational Administration, College of Education); Guanglong Pang (Educational Administration, College of Education); Brandy Ellison (Center for Integrative Studies in Social Science, College of Social Science)Format: WorkshopDate: May 11th, 2023Time: 2:45pm - 3:45pmClick here to viewDescription:Reflective practices emotionally connect learners to their classroom experiences. This connection increases self-efficacy, retention, and integration of content. Incorporating reflective practices meaningfully into learning spaces and syllabi can be elusive given the substantive demands of the curriculum and the temporal limits of the semester. This workshop will address the benefits and challenges of using reflective practices as a central component of the assessment and/or grading processes. Bailey Scholars Graduate and Faculty Fellows will share their experiences using reflective practices in their classes within and beyond the Bailey Scholars Program.