Sunset and trees reflected in water

Image by Fabry Att-NC-ND

This is the second post based on thoughts after the Centre for Recording Achievement’s conference on Personal Development Planning and ePortfolios.

One of the sessions was a presentation by a team from the University of Northumbria called Illuminating and Measuring Personal Development. It was a very detailed presentation but one thing that one presenter, Jamie Thompson talked about stuck with me.

When students are asked to reflect on their learning, how do they do that without an adequate vocabulary to express it? I’ve got used to reflecting on my learning because it suits my personality and because I’m 35 so I’ve had a lot of practice.

I wonder how many undergraduates are starting courses at university who haven’t been encouraged to think reflectively or meta-cognitively. I was never involved in school education post-GCSE so this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt but it was my impression that it was never a priority to give students a chance to develop skills in introspection.

The nearest most came was to do a Learning Styles questionnaire so they could label themselves as a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner. Aside from the fact that it’s a very crude (and unreliable) way of describing learning there was little follow-up.

I don’t blame any of the teaching staff for that. I think the way the National Curriculum and league table regimes are set up doesn’t put a value on skills like reflection, self-managed learning and collaboration. (i.e. it doesn’t matter if kids are self-aware learners. Have they got their 5 A-C’s and >90% attendance?).

I know it’s early days for a lot of schools but most VLE’s I saw were being used primarily as document repositories and the social tools like wiki’s, blogs, forums, chat etc remained under-developed. More than that, when I saw students actually using the tools it was in a very superficial manner, mainly I think due to the fact that it wasn’t a skill they were used to deploying.

Interestingly, I saw some fantastic examples of primary age pupils being encouraged to actively reflect on their learning and developing a language to help them to do this. I think the secondary system is arranged in a way that works against students continuing to build on these skills.

So, you have new undergraduate students entering a system where they are told that reflective learning is an essential skill but some (most?) will have little idea how to express that.

Going back to the conference presentation, the way round this that this team (and others, here’s a good example from Michael Hush and Chris Edwards at the OU) has used it to include a learning or emotional intelligence compentency inventory as part of their learning skills teaching.

Popular versions of this are:

The results from the inventory (ELLI in the case of Northumbria) were then incorporated into the students PDP and eportfolio.

I’m instinctively a little wary of skills inventories like this. I remember in my early days as a trainer blithely dishing out unauthorised copies of Honey and Mumford questionnaires or NLP-based Learning styles surveys without any real skill in interpreting them. As a result it was either a meaningless exercise or learners would switch off from certain learning activities because they’d take the attitude they were a visual learner “so I can’t take in what you’re saying to me.”

These skills inventories, though, are a long way from that; much more rigorous and coming with a robust framework for interpretation.

On the whole, I think they are a good idea providing:

  • Learners are helped to interpret the results properly and what the implications are for their own learning
  • The inventories are properly embedded in the broader teaching, learning and tutoring systems.
  • Learners don’t feel they have been badged for life.

Over time students will get into the habit of reflective learning becoming more autonomous and eventually developing their own emotional literacy and language for relflection.

Initially, though, these inventories provide a good form of scaffolding for people starting that journey.

Thanks to Rebecca Ferguson (@R3beccaF) at the OU for pointing me at the Hush and Edwards example.