Reflective practice exercise (Kate Norlock)

This is a guest post by Kate Norlock, Trent University.

Thanks to Helen De Cruz for encouraging me to write about my favorite assignment for this series. I am not the only professor who assigns a “Reflective Practice Exercise” of some sort, so I’m not sure this qualifies as unusual. So many of you do similar things that I’m keen to learn of different versions in the comments! But I am finding myself sharing my particular version a lot, and I hope it is interesting or helpful to others, especially if you teach introductory courses of over one hundred students.

First, here is the full text of a typical version of my Reflective Practice Exercise. 

The short version of it is this:

Pick one of the theories on our syllabus.

Plan out how you could practice it for at least seven hours over seven days.

Then practice it, and read and write about it every day of practice, following the instructions for how to write brief entries every hour/day. Then write a summary page about your own experience according to the instructions.

Before I go into the details, let me provide this quick explanation as to why I started assigning Reflective Practice. I am influenced by scholars of teaching and learning who argue that students benefit from assignments that involve them in their own learning processes. When I assign a hundred students to read Aristotle, they read his statement that it’s not enough to just hear or read what virtue might require, it is necessary to practice the virtues; otherwise, Aristotle says, they are “like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do [none of the actions].” This assignment is my attempt to get students to not just listen to me, but do the activities that Aristotle and I describe.

Of course, they do not have to practice Aristotle’s ethics! In the first month of the term, I make the pitch to my intro students that they must read over the whole syllabus and choose one theory to practice for at least seven hours and ideally over seven different days. I introduce the assignment to the students months before it is due, but advise them that I will not collect their work until after our midterm break. We talk about the project as a class, and I encourage them to start thinking early and often about what to practice, and how. I remind them of the exercise again, occasionally, in the course of covering different theories in different weeks.

They can choose any theory from our syllabus, with the following condition: “Although it is tempting, don’t choose a practice that you’re already doing for the same reasons identified by an author of this course… This is an opportunity to reflect on a habit you do not currently have.” On the first page of their write-ups, students write a line or two explaining why they chose the practice. (Since Stoic Week often occurs during our fall term, some students are motivated to choose it as their practice. Most of them are clear about why: “I thought Epictetus was wrong and weird and utterly the opposite of me.”)

I usually peg the assignment’s weight in the course grade to either 15% or 20%. This is partly because my students sometimes give the impression that 10% of a grade implies a task is unimportant or minor. It is also the culture here that major exams or papers are worth more like 25% of the course grade. Pegging the weight of the Reflective Practice Exercise to between 10% and 25% of the course grade has motivated my students to take it seriously but also to see it as less pressure than an exam. And I want them to enjoy this, if possible.

I tell them to outline a “method,” by which I make it clear that I really mean, a description of the times, days, and particular choices that they must plan in advance. I emphasize that I’m not a scientist and neither are they, and I do not expect a method in the sense that social scientists do. Instead, I tell them, I am asking them to be methodical, to devise a course of reading, writing, and interacting with others, so that they are deliberate and not merely winging the practice. This is not an experiment. It is a journal of one’s own experiences with trying to live up to an ethical theory in an intentional way.

Student responses are uniformly positive. Interestingly, regardless of which theory they choose, almost all students remark that they were thinking more about how they treated themselves and others. In other words, they felt that their ethical lives and their understanding of course content was deepened just by working on the project, and not because of the particular theoretical content. Most of them report finding it much easier to re-read the ethical theory after trying to live out the applications of the theory. Those who follow the instructions found it helpful to be required to re-read some part of the course reading each day. But even students who do not follow the instructions with care said it was instructive to practice an ethic, as one student excitedly put it, “on purpose!”

Their entries are supposed to be brief. For each day of practice, they are asked to write down three things:

(a) One or two sentences as to what they did (description).

(b) One or two sentences as to how well they believe they lived up to the theory behind the practice (self-evaluation).

And (c) one or two sentences explaining the answer to (b) in more detail, including some clear connection to the reading on which the student is basing their activity.

Students ask me for minimum and maximum word count, and I tell them the minimum is built into the instructions, and there is no maximum, but no grade bonus for length, either. I grade for completeness only. I share the rubric, which accords points on the basis of instructions followed and writing quality only.

Lengths vary wildly but are never boring. I find these take far less time to grade than do shorter assignments. Either instructions are followed or they are not. It is easy to recognize complete entries and it is absorbing to read their impressions of the theories. I stick to the rubric, which helps me to quickly track whether or not a student identified what theory they practiced, and how they planned to practice it, whether entries included all expected parts including clear connection to the reading, and whether the summary paragraph is correct about the theory, including appropriate application. I grade that final page like a proper essay, and check to see if it includes at least one or two documented direct quotations of the relevant reading.

A change I need to make is that the summary “paragraph” should be renamed a summary page. It really is always a two-paragraph, single-spaced page by the time students do everything I suggest. My prompt for that last page suggests this: “Re-read some or all of the author on which you based the practice, and identify a passage or line that now sticks out to you, a recommendation that seems more true or more in error than it did before, a feature of the reading that you think differently about after 7 hours or more of practice, or similar. You can reflect upon what your practice reveals to you about the theory, or what you learned, or what you find the limits of the practice to be, or what you would do differently, or what you hate about it if you wish. It’s up to you.”

They grab that prompt with both hands and write a full page. Even the less completist students have a lot to share about what line or passage jumps out at them from the page now that they’ve tried to practice the theory. “I feel like the author is talking to me, now,” one student said in class after the due date, and others nodded.

I self-consciously imitated some bureaucratic assessment language at my university in asking students if they wished to identify the limits of the theory that we read, and I have to admit, that’s some good assessment-language, because it brings out some insightful comments from students, often. Those who took up Kant or Mill occasionally tell me that those theories didn’t accommodate committed partiality, such as prioritizing a relationship or a loved one over others. Those who took up care ethics or Confucian philosophy located gaps in guidance as to how to set boundaries to attentiveness to others, discerning concerns that much more advanced scholars share. Good work, students!

I assign point values to different parts of the project, and although I believe I place 100% within reach of all the students, not all students follow all instructions on planning in advance and connecting entries to text, not all of them always get the theory quite right, and not all of them leave themselves enough time. So, although I worried that I’d be pouring out A+ grades on all students, the reality is that students only do a bit better on this than they do on their other work. Those who put in much thought and effort reap the rewards. Those who confess that they left this until the last day get appropriately lower grades if they don’t spare time for reflection on connections between what they read and what they do. And that reminds me to explain a safety valve built into this assignment.

I mentioned that students are walked through the instructions a month or more in advance, and told to practice seven hours over, “ideally,” seven different days. But I also mentioned wanting students to actually enjoy this, and to actually do it. So I tell my students very frankly that if they are running out of time and realize with less than a week to go that they haven’t even started the project, then they can do the seven entries in fewer days. I tell them of students who did seven hours consecutively, and had consequently less high-quality reflection or writing, but still receive some credit. I do this for many reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t want them associating an exercise in reflective practice with high stress and I don’t want to motivate emails begging for extensions. I hope for all my students that they have loads of time and the sweet leisure to contemplate. But not all do, sometimes for unforeseeable reasons. The safety valve works great. The vast majority of students do the assignment exactly as recommended, and those who don’t seem less stressed about last-minute submissions.

It's an honor to read these every term. I don’t have a T.A., so it’s a lot of reading. But it is by far more interesting to mark than are many shorter assignments. I hope this is helpful.

Comments

[A philosopher]

This is an interesting exercise. Quite apart from the learning of an ethical theory, they learn to be reflective, or so it seems. I think this is quite important as many students, even quite strong students, are remarkably unreflective. They acquire "recipes" for finishing assignments in expedient ways. This exercise has them stop that pattern, and then think ...

[talking lion]

I've decided to give a similar assignment to my ethics students this fall, and wanted to report that they're excited about doing it--which is pretty unusual for an assignment. I think it appeals to me because as a non-ethicist I can myself feel a bit alienated from the material in ethics courses at times, and because ethical thought experiments (especially for deontology & consequentialism) are so detached from ordinary life.

[Teaching online]

I love this idea - thank you for spelling out the details here. I wonder if anyone has experience with assignments like this in an online class? Assuming this was done in an in-person setting (it may not have been!) what, if anything, would need to be different about an online version?