Reflective thinking

Subject classification: this is an education resource.

The term reflective thinking is not found in Wikipedia but it will yield many hits on the Internet only, and is a clumsy one. The word reflection means thinking itself, so the two words together sound like reflect thinking. However, they are not about speed of thinking or about cognition, but about compartmentalizing thoughts, analyzing influences, and creating new meaning from the process. An overview of the subject in this sense is found in a Stanford student website.

In any case, it is meant to be examining and thinking about thinking, which is clumsily similar to introspection as defined in Wikipedia.

Further examples of the phrase "reflective thinking" are also found as book titles: (examples include: Reflective Thinking by Reverend Brian Branche, Athena Press, London 2005 and In Search of Thinking: Reflective Encounters in Experiencing the World by Richard Bunzl, Sophia Books, UK, 2008).

But the most important usage of the term reflective is in "reflectiveness" as identified in the key competences in a PISA document of the EU:

“

Reflectiveness – the heart of key competencies

An underlying part of this framework is reflective thought and action. Thinking reflectively demands relatively complex mental processes and requires the subject of a thought process to become its object. For example, having applied themselves to mastering a particular mental technique, reflectiveness allows individuals to then think about this technique, assimilate it, relate it to other aspects of their experiences, and to change or adapt it. Individuals who are reflective also follow up such thought processes with practice or action.

Thus, reflectiveness implies the use of metacognitive skills (thinking about thinking), creative abilities and taking a critical stance. It is not just about how individuals think, but also about how they construct experience more generally, including their thoughts, feelings and social relations. This requires individuals to reach a level of social maturity that allows them to distance themselves from social pressures, take different perspectives, make independent judgments and take responsibility for their actions.

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Reflection

Reflective thinking is a series of logical rational steps based on the scientific method of defining, analyzing, and solving a problem.

Quote:

"The reflective learning process

What is the role of reflection in the learning process?

Students sometimes view reflective writing as an annoying interruption to the serious business of developing content knowledge in their subject area. However, there are sound reasons why reflective writing is included in student assessment.

"Reflection is indicative of deep learning, and where teaching and learning activities such as reflection are missing… only surface learning can result." Biggs 1999 in King 2002

Reflective writing tasks are given to students to help students learn through reflection, precisely because of the established link between reflection and deeper learning. As well as facilitating and expanding learning, the intention is to produce graduates who have acquired the habit of reflection as a means of continuing to learn and grow in their professions. Reflection can lead to:

• personal growth
• professional growth
• meaningful change.

"Reflection leads to growth of the individual – morally, personally, psychologically, and emotionally, as well as cognitively".Branch & Paranjape, 2002, p. 1187

Reflection can help you to:

• better understand your strengths and weaknesses
• identify and question your underlying values and beliefs
• acknowledge and challenge possible assumptions on which you base your ideas, feelings and actions
• recognize areas of potential bias or discrimination
• acknowledge your fears, and
• identify possible inadequacies or areas for improvement.

Reflection can lead to greater self-awareness, which in turn is a first step to positive change – it is a necessary stage in identifying areas for improvement and growth in both personal and professional contexts. Taking time to reflect can help you identify approaches that have worked well, and in that way reinforce good practice."

In an academic context, reflective thinking usually involves:

1. looking back at something (often an event i.e. something that happened, but could also be an idea or object)
2. analyzing the event or idea (thinking in depth and from different perspectives, and trying to explain, often with

reference to a model or theory from your subject)

1. thinking carefully about what the event or idea means for you and your ongoing progress as a learner and/or practicing professional.

Reflective writing is thus more personal than other kinds of academic writing. Reflective thinking is an approach of self-observation in order to document the mental operations that take place in your mind with an aim to put them right if they are resulting in irregularities or low QoL. Documenting it in a commonly accepted and tangible format provides a basis for mutual understanding and resolution as opposed to rumination, and it also records and justifies paths taken.

Comments and evaluations

In order to be able to write about the subject with any level of precision, you need to identify the chunk of reality that is tagged to the experience of knowledge in reflective thinking. This process also demands disambiguation, which is an obvious step to take when it is not just one strand of thought but different chunks of reality.

Disambiguation is basically decontextualization, or taking knowledge already in circulation or points out of its original context with an aim to include it in a collection of knowledge representations, or like the Wikipedia or any other body of lexical knowledge that usually sorts knowledge categorically and alphabetically.

Reflective writing is about making knowledge available to others through communication by using a language. Thinking takes place in the mind or is performed in the brains that is the core device for thinking. As a result of such an operation, one gets a headword or personalised annotation, usually just the meaning, which is often only a little more than a definition.

The process reduces gaps between what we know individually and collectively, and aims to establish interconnectivity between the two. It involves reflecting personal knowledge against collective knowledge representations and pinpointing any open and unsolved problems or timely issues.

Reflective thinking is a school subject elsewhere, as critical thinking is in the UK. Reflective thinking places emphasis on teaching people to think critically about thinking as opposed to learning lexical knowledge. Reflective thinking is about logic and enlightening study, though not strictly about formal or informal logic, but it is very useful in this complex topic. The difficulty in writing about reflective thinking or thinking at all lies in the available content for thinking and the tendency of thoughts to flow, which can block the effort for self-inspection or introspection for tangible results as part of the ongoing stream of consciousness to record the process in forms of saying or writing.

One possible solution to observing and grasping ideas in their transient status for reflective thinking may be to set up a theory of thinking in terms of data and operations of those data. Everybody understands a computer model and how a PC works as a useful metaphor or a different paradigm for the description of cognitive operations that are not directly observable, regardless of their physical realization, as a process that happens in the brain or PCs.

Usually reflective thinking also happens in connection with emotions and strongly willed assumptions, which demands additional resources for troubleshooting. Reflective thinking as a process should be limited to reason and rationality, in other words unaffected by feelings and determination, relying on reason and reasoning only. Reason and reasoning are often identified with logic, and logic is mainly thought of as formal logic with its roots in ancient philosophy and mathematical logic. Moreover, besides logic and philosophy, it needs to be acknowledged that integration of a multidisciplinary approach is needed for the subject to be best understood in a demonstrable capacity.

In fact, as emotion and will will interact with thinking, it is necessary to see thinking in reflection as something neutral and organized despite the continuous flow or stream of thoughts that we experience. John Dewey calls it the disciplined mind as a prerequisite of the acquisition of knowledge as presented by using a language.

Quote from Dewey:

Discipline of mind is thus, in truth, a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline represents -original native endowment turned, through gradual exercise, into True and effective power. So far as a mind is disciplined, control of method in a given subject has been attained so that the mind is able to manage itself independently without external tutelage. The aim of education is precisely to develop intelligence of this independent and effective type a disciplined mind. Discipline is positive and constructive.

Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative as a painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with drill; and Discipline drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material ; or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking, but uniform external modes of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.

When discipline is conceived in intellectual terms (as or freedom tne habitual power of effective mental attack), it is identified with freedom in its true sense. For freedom of mind means mental power capable of independent exercise, emancipated from the leading string of others, not mere unhindered external operation. When spontaneity or naturalness is identified with more or less casual discharge of transitory impulses, the tendency of Freedom the educator is to supply a multitude of stimuli in order that spontaneous activity may be kept up. All sorts of interesting materials, equipments, tools, modes of activity, are provided in order that there may be no flagging of free self-expression. This method overlooks some of the essential conditions of the attainment of genuine freedom. Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is fatal to thinking. Only when the thought impulse is to some extent checked and thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It is, indeed, a stupid error to suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to furnish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is the necessary cue to thought. Every vital activity of any depth and range inevitably meets obstacles in the course of its effort to realize itself a fact that renders the search for artificial or external problems quite superfluous. The difficulties that present themselves within the development of an experience are, however, to be cherished by the educator, not minimized, for they are the natural stimuli to reflective inquiry. Freedom does not consist in keeping up uninterrupted and unimpeded external activity, but is something achieved through conquering, by personal reflection, a way out of the difficulties that prevent an immediate overflow and a spontaneous success.

() The method that emphasizes the psychological intellectual and natural, but yet fails to see what an important part factors are of the natural tendencies is constituted at every period of growth by curiosity, inference, and the desire to test, cannot secure a natural development. In natural growth each successive stage of activity prepares unconsciously, but thoroughly, the conditions for the manifestation of the next stage as in the cycle of a plant's growth.

There is no ground for assuming that "thinking" is a special, isolated natural tendency that will bloom inevitably in due season simply because various sense and motor activities have been freely manifested before; or because observation, memory, imagination, and manual skill have been previously exercised without thought. Only when thinking is constantly employed in using the senses and muscles for the guidance and application of observations and movements, is the way prepared for subsequent higher types of thinking. At present, the notion is current that childhood is Genesis of almost entirely unreflective a period of mere sensory, motor, and memory development, while adolescence suddenly brings the manifestation of thought and reason,

Adolescence is not, however, a synonym for magic, mental Doubtless youth should bring with it an enlargement of the horizon of childhood, a susceptibility to larger concerns and issues, a more generous and a more general standpoint toward nature and social life. This development affords an opportunity for thinking of a more comprehensive and abstract type than has previously obtained. But thinking itself remains just what it has been all the time : a matter of following up and testing the conclusions suggested by the facts and events of life. Thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing its recovery ; and begins to forecast steps toward the realization of this possibility, and, by experimentation, to guide his acts by his ideas and thereby also test the ideas. Only by making the most of the thought-factor, already active in the experiences of childhood, is there any promise or warrant for the emergence of superior reflective power at adolescence, or at any later period.

(c) In any case positive habits are being formed : if not habits of careful looking into things, then habits of hasty, heedless, impatient glancing over the surface ; if not habits of consecutively following up the suggestions that occur, then habits of haphazard, grasshopper-like guessing ; if not habits of suspending judgment till inferences have been tested by the examination of evidence, then habits of credulity alternating with flippant incredulity, belief or unbelief being based, in either case, upon whim, emotion, or accidental circumstances. The only way to achieve traits of carefulness, thoroughness, and continuity (traits that are, as we have seen, the elements of the "logical") is by exercising these traits from the beginning, and by seeing to it that conditions call for their exercise.

Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to "turn things over," to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kind of evidence requisite for decision is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek such evidence. If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice, or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appetite, sense, and circumstance.

See also

http://manybooks.net/titles/schopenhauera10731073110731-8.html

See my lecture on the subject of synchronizing thinking, Genezistan 12:50, 5 December 2009 (UTC):

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Genezistan/Synchronization_of_thoughts/lecture_1

Examples

• Reflections on intersectionality