The Impact of Reflection on Student Learning: A Learner’s Perspective

I followed the sort of format of Inspired Insights, Magnificent Failures and Unanticipated Connections.  I originally didn’t have a very good introduction page but then I looked at some of the things the other co-op students were doing, took some of their ideas and applied it to my own. So I definitely see what we’re talking about of students being able to see other students work and I think it did help me make mine better.

And then a little bit about me, kind of my schooling, my other co-op terms and just some of the things that I’m interested in and wanted to take away from this position. And then I kind of just do a little summary, I guess, of everything before going into it all. And, so yeah, for the first page, or second page I guess, I have just things that I learned, things that I did this term and, again, mine was focused just on this one term rather than like an overview of all the things I’ve done. So I’ve just got all the sort of things I worked on, to talk about editing and interpreting surveys. Then I have a little picture and some things I did, like I was able to participate in a Fundamentals of University Teaching program, so I’ve included that, and just little pictures of other tasks, things like that. So it kind of gave me a chance to see what all I’d worked on throughout the term and just being able to kind of realize that and reflect on what I’ve learned from these things and then I was also able to reflect on things that didn’t go so well.   

I was able to kind of talk through the process of getting better at reflecting.  And kind of why I struggle with it, and honestly, talking about it and reflecting helped me kind of realize what I struggled with and put it into words that, you know, I was able to convey to others and share with other co-op students. And so that’s what this sort of section is. It’s a lot of… I struggled with writing things down rather than just speaking about them. But then how working on the eportfolio, and I did weekly reflections as well. And it was really great to be able to have like weekly reflection prompts that Catherine had provided me when making this portfolio because I had a record of everything I did throughout the term, what areas I really struggled with and what areas I wanted to improve in and things I did well, things that didn’t go so well, and maybe why they didn’t go well. So it was really helpful when making this portfolio to have previous reflections to build off of and then I was able to see things that I normally wouldn’t have, just through the reflecting process. 

So I was able to connect previous experiences with the work that I did this term. So, for example, I did a lot of coding and working with survey data, and I was able to connect that to previous work I’d done in a different lab and different courses I’d taken to kind of develop those skills and be able to apply the skills. I also worked with a lot of really great co-workers so I was able to make the connection between working with coworkers and joining all the groups and social activities that I did throughout the term and realize that that’s more important to me than the work that I’m doing.  I have something to show for all my work as well which has been really good. We were actually presenting these to all the staff and the other co-ops and able to see kind of the work that we’ve done and share what work we did and what we plan to do with the things we’ve learned and it was really a great way to kind of wrap up the term and see all of our work. And then my summary is just, you know, the connections I’ve made. And then just going over each of the sort of pages again. I did do a final page just thanking everybody at the CTE for helping me throughout the term and helping my growth.  So I was able to share that with them at the end too which was really nice and special.

Those ones were provided to me and I was able to kind of take them and tweak them. So, like in Unanticipated Connections it was supposed to be mainly, you know, what connections you made to outside things. And so I did that a little bit with the connecting to other courses I’d taken and that kind of connection. But then I also kind of made it my own and talked about the connections I made with co-workers. So that was something that I kind of switched up to the idea but stayed on that theme. But yeah, they were all provided to me as part of the assignment or the task.

So definitely opening up about failures was something I was kind of hesitant to do at first just because it’s like, you know, you’re sharing it with your boss and everybody who you might want to work for again someday and you don’t want to necessarily say like I did a bad job. But, no, I think the main thing, and Catherine was really good with this, was kind of rephrasing it as it’s not something necessarily that you did bad, it’s something that you that didn’t go as well as you wanted it to that you can grow from. So just focusing on like the positive side of the failure. Yeah, I was surprised I think most just by how much my coworkers influenced me and how important that is to me. That’s something I didn’t really…  like I knew I was a people person and I like to have a social work environment but even in the remote work it was surprising to me how much I was able to connect with people that I never even met face to face I guess. But yeah, and I think just reflecting and stuff was something, if I wasn’t forced to reflect I wouldn’t have realized that it does make me uncomfortable. But different ways that work for me, like I was able to reflect for, you know, 20 minutes and just focus on it and not worry about editing and that’s something that I’d never really done before. So, yeah, there was definitely some big takeaways that I didn’t expect that I don’t think I would have realized without doing this e-portfolio.

I definitely think so. I think even just remembering that the tasks that I did, I went back through my weekly reflections when I was making an e-portfolio and I was like, oh yeah, I did do that. That happened like the first week or first few weeks and I totally forgot about it by the end of the term, So, just looking at it again probably in, you know, a year or so, I’ll probably come back to it and add to it from, you know, the next term I do and I’ll probably be surprised again what all I did and so I think so, yeah.