Reflective Thinking Skills

1. Reflective Thinking Skills

2. Outline • What is Reflective Thinking? • Why is reflective thinking important? • How to become a Reflective Thinker? • Perspectives on Reflection • Three stages of Intellectual development

3. What is Reflective Thinking? • “…the process of creating and clarifying the meaning of experience (past or present) in terms of self (self in relation to self and self in relation to the world.)” Boyd & Fales . Reflective Learning: Key to Learning from Experience. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1983 • Reflective thinking is a part of the critical thinking process referring specifically to the processes of analyzing, evaluating, and making judgments about what has happened.

4. Why is reflective thinking important? • Modern society is becoming more complex, information is becoming available and changing morerapidly prompting users to constantly rethink, switch directions, and change problem-solving strategies. • Thus, it is increasingly important to prompt reflective thinking during learning to help learners developstrategies to apply new knowledge to the complex situations in their day-to-day activities. • Reflectivethinking helps learners develop higher-order thinking skills by prompting learners to a) relate newknowledge to prior understanding, b) think in both abstract and conceptual terms, c) apply specificstrategies in novel tasks, and d) understand their own thinking and learning strategies.

5. Three stages of intellectual development • Dualism. Very young or unsophisticated thinkers tend to see the world in polar terms: black and white, good and bad, and so on. These students also have what Perry calls a “cognitive egocentrism”—that is, they find it difficult to entertain points of view other than the ones they themselves embrace. If they have no strong beliefs on a topic, they tend to ally themselves absolutely to whatever authority they find appealing. At this stage in their development, students believe that there is a “right” side, and they want to be on it. They believe that their arguments are undermined by the consideration of other points of view. • Relativism. As students progress in their academic careers, they come to understand that there often is no single right answer to a problem, and that some questions have no answers. Students who enter the stage of relativism are beginning to contextualize knowledge and to understand the complexities of any intellectual position. However, the phase of relativism has some pitfalls—among them that students in this phase sometimes give themselves over to a kind of skepticism. For the young relativist, if there is no Truth, then every opinion is as good as another. At its worst, relativism leads students to believe that opinion is attached to nothing but the person who has it, and that evidence, logic, and clarity have little to do with an argument’s value. • Reflectivism. If students are properly led through the phase of relativism, they will eventually come to see that indeed, some opinions are better than others. They will begin to be interested in what makes one argument better than another. Is it well reasoned? Well supported? Balanced? Sufficiently complex? When students learn to evaluate the points of view of others, they will begin to evaluate their own. In the end, they will be able to commit themselves to a point of view that is objective, well reasoned, sophisticated—one that, in short, meets all the requirements of an academic argument. William Perry’s Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (1970)