Reflection

Reflection provides us with opportunities to understand ourselves, our families, our communities, our cultures, and our learning. Reflection helps us get past our surface understanding of something and connect to deeper insights and layers of awareness. Reflection also helps us integrate what we have learned with our daily lived experience and our hopes for ourselves.

In addition to reflection to integrate learning, reflection has also been a powerful tool for social justice. It helps to people to examine their own experiences of oppression, heal, and use what they have learned to empathize with others. Reflection helps people situate themselves within different social contexts and understand who they are in relation to other people and their environment.

Reflection gives us the power to know ourselves and use that knowing to connect across differences. SLCC ePortfolio Reflections rely on 4 main types of reflection.

Summative Reflection

• In what ways have you improved as a writer/artist/scientist, etc.? What brought about those improvements? Point to specific experiences, readings, assignments, or discussions in this course.
• What was your biggest accomplishment in the course? How did the signature assignments and other course elements help you reach it? Be specific.
• What skills did you master in this course? How are they reflected in your signature assignments and other course work? Be specific.

Process Reflection

• What problems did you encounter in completing the signature assignments? How did you troubleshoot them?
• Talk about the aims and strategies that led to the completion of your signature assignments. How did your thinking about the assignments evolve over time? Illustrate this using specific experiences you had while working on the assignments. How did the assignment evolve (or not) with your thinking? What went according to plan and what surprises did you encounter? What still needs work?
• Outline the steps you took to complete the signature assignments, and tell me about your thinking at each step.

Evaluative Reflection

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your signature assignments? Explain while making specific references to your work.
• Discuss your best work in this course and explain using specific references to the work what it’s your best.

Learning Reflection

• Make connections between what you learned in this course with what you’ve learned in other courses at SLCC or before. Make specific references to your work in this class and in the other courses. How did what you learn in the other courses enhance what you learned in here, and vice versa?
• Take a look at SLCC’s learning outcomes for General Education. Not that while no individual course helps students move toward achieving all of those outcomes, each General Education course is supposed to help you make progress in achieving as many of those outcomes as are relevant to the course. Making specific references to your work in this course, tell me how you have progressed toward achieving at least three of those outcomes.
• Reflect on how you thought about (course topic) before you took this course and how you think about it now that the course is over. Have any of your assumptions or understandings changed? Why? What assignments/ activities/readings were influential in this process? How will you approach (course topic) differently in the future?

Additional ways that reflection can be used:

• Reflection for cultural and ancestral memory
• Reflection for decolonization
• Reflection for healing
• Reflection for identity (feminist, queer, neurodivergent, disability, etc.)
• Reflection for liberation
• Reflection for spirituality

Reflection Examples (Coming Soon)

Please note that we are using/providing these examples by permission and for viewers to not plagiarize the authors’ work.