Reflection, Critical Thinking, and the Liberal Arts
Reflection is critical thinking. An unreflective thinker is the opposite of a critical thinker. When students
engage in reflective writing, they are developing and practicing their critical thinking abilities at a level beyond the
basic conventional critical thinking skills of logic, premises and conclusions, etc. and from an orientation more
clearly in line with the goals of a liberal arts education. The goals of critical reflection are openness and insight, as
well as realization that one's own perspective can and should be questioned, altered, and interpreted.
Reflection is a deliberate and rigorous process of deep and, ideally, transformative learning. Through
critical reflection, the writer examines how he constructs meaning and connects experiences with concepts.
According to The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, a critical thinker
* raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;
* gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstractions to interpret it effectively;
* comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
* thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their
assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and
* communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems. 1 ('Solution' is not
necessarily a final answer or recommendation; it may be a new perspective or even a new uncertainty).
Reflective writing includes each of these elements of rigorous critical thinking, with an added emphasis on
reconsidering preconceptions, exploring conflicts between competing values and concepts, and carefully
considering the implications of various views for the writer’s actions. The set of critical thinking skills that
students can learn by studying Browne and Keely can certainly be of use in the exploration of ideas, concepts and
actions, but it is important to remember that 'argumentation' and 'critical thinking' are not synonymous.
The set of skills covered in Asking the Right Questions can help students learn to read more effectively and to
recognize and to analyze both the quality and the nature of their own and others' conclusions, assumptions, evidence,
and reasonableness, but 'critical thinking' encompasses more than recognizing and using issues, conclusions,
assumptions, premises, and so on. In Higher Education: A Critical Business, R. Barnett asserts that a focus on the
'logical' skills of conventionally defined critical thinking is not sufficient; education requires critical reflection,
particularly in the liberal arts, where learning includes concepts and experiences that require more than simple
1
Paul, Richard, and Linda Elder. The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools. 2000 ver. Dilton
Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking. 1999. p. 1.
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examination of 'lines of reasoning,' fallacies, and assumptions. 2 Hence the emphasis in reflective writing is on
carefully exploring concepts and preconceptions in the light of experience (especially course texts) such that
students are encouraged to work honestly and creatively through the implications of what they are learning rather
than to argue positions reflexively.
Some Ideas About How to Teach Reflective Writing
Reflection is a process perhaps best described as analogous to the scientific method. In brief, reflection is
approximated in the following model:
/ exploration
to
conjecture
to
analysis
to
re-examination/synthesis.
In a reflective essay, a student explains his understanding of the subject of his reflection – based on his
reading -- and explores his assumptions and preconceptions about the subject. This exploration (and the
dissonances, questions, and so on that it uncovers) leads the writer to formulate a conjecture (a question, an
inference, etc. about the subject of reflection) that lends itself to analysis, a close and thoughtful examination of the
relationships among the ideas and the experiences under consideration. This analysis may also give rise to new
questions and perceptions. Finally, in the synthesis/re-examination, the student discusses the broader insights,
implications, and conclusions to which his reflection has led him.
Explanation/ Exploration
First, providing a clear explanation of the texts encountered is crucial to the process of critical reflection
because students cannot reflect on what they have not understood. So the most basic consideration in teaching
reflective writing is ensuring that students read critically – that they grasp the ideas and the relationships among the
ideas in a text.
Reflection also requires that the student engage in a careful exploration of her own preconceptions and
assumptions. At this stage the student clarifies her own preconceptions about the topic and compares them with the
ideas gleaned from the texts. This comparison ultimately leads to the conjectures that facilitate further reflection
about the topic in the next stage.
Scoggins, Jane and Richard Winter. “The Patchwork Text: A Coursework Format for Education as Critical
Understanding.” Teaching in Higher Education 4 (1999): 485-500.
2
2
It is in explanation/ exploration phase of the reflection process that the student's personal experiences may
be relevant, and specificity is appropriate as long as any anecdotes are offered as support. In other words, relating
personal experience is not an end in itself but should function to illuminate or explain the student's thinking. What
is important in teaching this stage of the process is guiding the student in connecting personal experience to the
broader issue. Because students tend to get stuck in their narratives of personal experience, the challenges in this
phase of the reflection process are helping students to articulate and focus on a conjecture and guiding students in
establishing correct proportion and emphasis (between general and specific, etc.). The most effective and valuable
way to teach these concepts is to have students revise drafts on which you have written comments and questions
addressing these concerns. (Writing Sample 1)
Conjecture
Another key issue in teaching students reflective writing is to help them understand what a conjecture is
and how it functions as part of the reflection process. When making a conjecture, a student is raising a question,
proposing a path for expanded speculation, or laying out a supposition that he wants to explore in an open ended
fashion. In other words, a conjecture raises a question or issue for exploration, rather than a position to be defended.
Of course this does not prevent a student from forming a solution or argument in her synthesis, but solution and
argument are not the primary goals of this endeavor.
A strong conjecture is worthy of further analysis. Likewise, a challenging conjecture can help the student
achieve greater depth and rigor as he reflects. A question or supposition that is too superficial will make it difficult
for a student to do the necessary examination and synthesis that is essential to critical reflection. At the same time, a
student’s struggle with focusing her conjecture can give an instructor insight on whether the student has understood
the reading, has been seduced by tangential details, or has failed to see the relationship between broader concerns.
At the most basic level, making a conjecture is akin to developing a thesis statement. It may be useful to remind
students that their conjecture is not necessarily in the “prompt” provided by the PDP 150 instructor. Rather, their
conjecture will be an independent idea they develop. In the reflective writing process, the conjecture announces the
idea at the heart of the analysis and the synthesis.
Analysis
Although analysis appears in the model as a distinct phase of the reflection process, it may be interwoven
with the preceding phase, just as it may be appropriate to combine the explanation and the exploration. Analysis,
of course, involves breaking something down into its parts and examining not only each part but also the
relationships among the parts. Thus, we can say that in articulating and illuminating his conjecture, the student is
examining the parts, but he must carry the analysis further by exploring relationships. At this stage, then, reflection
involves perceiving differences and similarities between one's preconceptions and the ideas encountered in reading
as well as the questions, uncertainties, and new ideas which result from this co-mingling and juxtapositioning of
thoughts and experiences. As students are learning how to reflect, you may find that you have to help them through
this stage of the process by posing questions that suggest relationships and themes that they are not perceiving.
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Again, students tend to get sidetracked by the specific and need help stepping back to see broader, more general
concepts. Revision guided by your questions and comments is the best way to help students master analysis.
Synthesis/ Re-examination
The final stage in the process of reflection is synthesis/re-examination. Here the student considers the
insights, implications, and conclusions arising from the review and analysis of his knowledge and experience.
Ideally, this re-examination from a new (informed and analyzed) perspective casts new light on the thinker's former,
current, and future knowledge. Students do not necessarily come to this stage intuitively, so the primary task is to
work with students on moving beyond the immediate and the concrete. Again, leading questions are a useful device.
Encourage students to move beyond simply restating their previous discussion and instead to treat the final stage as
an opportunity to explore the implications or consequences of the conclusions they reached through the previous
stages.
The importance of drafting and revising cannot be emphasized enough. Students learn to write by writing,
not by being told how to write. A couple of helpful suggestions to keep you from feeling overwhelmed by drafts are
(1) to have students turn in preceding drafts with revisions so that you can quickly zero in on areas that should have
been revised and can see immediately whether students have, in fact, made changes; and (2) to avoid trying to mark
everything on every single draft. For instance, if an essay's basic ideas are so off-base or so sparsely supported that
quite substantial content changes need to be made, it is a waste of your time to mark spelling and punctuation
because those issues are not what you want the student to revise for and because the text in which those errors occur
may not even appear in the revision.
A Reflection on Reflective Writing
Dr. J. Josefson
When the PDP 150 Summer Committee met to redesign PDP150 around the theme of “reflective writing”
we started by trying to figure out just what is reflective writing. To get us going Stacy Pauley gave us a folder of
readings she pulled off the Web. It was as if she had Googled “reflective writing” and printed out the first 20 hits. I
think Stacy’s idea was for us to read a lot about reflection so we could brainstorm our own definition, rather than
just use someone else’s. This seemed like an awfully rigorous and inductive process to be suggested by an English
professor, so I was suspicious, but I went along anyway. 3
I was drawn to two distinct ideas among the confusing array of information in the folder. First, I was
drawn to the discussion of John Dewey, the famous American philosopher of pragmatism, since I’m a political
philosopher myself. Dewey suggested that the process of reflection was analogous to the scientific method, with
“the realization of the potential significance of an experience being carried forward from the questions generated
3
This paragraph is strictly introductory and (hopefully) a little humorous at Stacy’s expense.
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from that experience to hypotheses, and then the testing of these”. 4 From this I took that a reflective essay should
develop something like a scientific hypothesis that is then sort of tested through reflection on “evidence” such as
texts encountered in a course and preconceived values and beliefs. The second idea that seemed important was that
reflection was different from critical thinking and formulating arguments. As R. Barnett argued, ‘a focus on the
logical skills of conventionally defined critical thinking is not sufficient; education requires critical reflection,
particularly in the liberal arts, where learning includes concepts and experiences that require more than simple
explanation of ‘lines of reasoning’, fallacies and assumptions”. 5 This seemed like an especially important insight
since I had taught PDP150 with an emphasis on teaching students critical thinking and writing arguments for the
past two years. Perhaps we’ve been doing it all wrong! 6
The possibility that we had been approaching things wrong had already occurred to me as I read PDP
portfolios. PDP 150 was supposed to train students to write great portfolios, but the reflective essays that students
wrote were usually pretty bad. Generally they only described in very general and vague terms the things students
had done and then concluded with silly platitudes about how the students sure had grown a lot during their time at
Bridgewater College. Two years ago when I first became involved in PDP, I joined others in trying to address this
problem of banal description by encouraging students to “integrate” the four dimensions of PDP. The idea here was
that if they were trying to create a seamless narrative about their development they would go beyond just reciting a
laundry list of stuff they had done in each dimension. But that didn’t seem to help. Students who “integrated” the
dimensions only muddied or ignored them, with the result that the essays were even more vague, embarrassingly
personal, and anecdotal.7
So how was emphasizing reflection going to help? This seemed especially problematic to me because
Dewey’s description of reflection as a something like hypothesis testing seemed like an effort to introduce an
inappropriate level of pseudo scientific rigor to a process (personal development) that couldn’t be scientific. At the
same time, Barnett’s idea seemed to suggest that reflection was incompatible with critical thinking. How could we
introduce reflection into PDP 150, which had been organized around critical thinking and making arguments,
without completely redesigning the whole course? 8
As I thought about it, however, I came to think that an emphasis on reflective writing could both improve
PDP150 and PDP portfolios. Dewey didn’t mean for reflection to be synonymous with chemistry. Rather, I think
he meant to mimic something of the systematic nature of scientific thinking, especially the simple process of
developing questions, coming up with possible answers, and then seeing if any of the answers fit with the available
evidence. Certainly this is what I want students to do in PDP 150. My biggest frustration has been to get students to
understand texts and then relate them to their own values and situations. The “reflective method” gives students a
framework to do just that. If students are led to develop hypotheses (or better, conjectures because conjectures
Terry King, “Development of Student Skills in Reflective Writing”, p. 4.
Scoggins and Winter, p. 2. See also,
6
This paragraph involves the Explanation stage of reflective writing. I spend most of the time explaining the texts
I encountered. I also do some Exploration.
7
This paragraph is mostly Exploration, especially about my perceptions concerning the topic.
8
This paragraph sets out my Conjecture. My conjecture questions how reflective writing can work in PDP150 and
train students to write better PDP reflective essays.
4
5
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suggest a more reflective process) that they in turn evaluate by assessing the adequacy of texts and their own
preconceived values and beliefs, then they will be doing exactly the kind of thinking that constitutes personal
development.9
This kind of thinking also achieves Barnett’s goal of moving beyond critical thinking while at the same
time preserving an important place for critical thinking. Certainly critical thinking skills are involved when students
explain texts and evaluate the adequacy of the texts and their preconceptions in the light of each other. But
reflection involves the added step of coming up with some sort of synthesis of texts and preconceptions such that
students are led to consider the implications and applications of what they have learned. Rather than making an
argument or supporting an opinion, this process demands that students work honestly, openly and creatively through
what they have learned such that the process is an occasion for learning itself and not just a reflexive recitation of
prejudices and platitudes.
If we can teach students this process of reflection and reflective writing I think that the PDP program will
be greatly improved. Before I thought we could get students to write better PDP essays by having them synthesize
the four dimensions into one coherent story of personal development. Now I realize that that was the wrong kind of
synthesis. We need to preserve the distinctiveness of the four dimensions because they encourage students to
appreciate that being fully human requires involvement in an array of distinct endeavors. 10 The kind of synthesis we
want students to develop is the kind of synthesis taught in reflective writing: a comparison of what the student has
learned with what they thought before and an exploration of the implications for what they have learned for their
future. If we can start getting students to develop this kind of synthesis in PDP150, we will truly have accomplished
something.11
9
This paragraph and the following one are Analysis. Note how I reexamine the texts and my preconceptions in the
light of one another.
10
In my article “Learning is Not Fun: Reflection on the Liberal Arts and Living Your Best Life”
(www.bridgewater.edu/~jjosefso/josefson’slearningisnotfun.htm), I argue for this idea that human freedom has
distinct dimensions and trace it to ancient Greek philosophy.
11
The previous two paragraphs include some syntheses, but this one is mainly synthesis. I draw the implication that
reflective writing has changed my whole conception of what a PDP reflective essay should be and, therefore, how
I’ll teach and grade them.
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