Resources for Reflective Writing and Metacognition

Metacognition  By: Smith, Tricia, Research Starters: Education (Online Edition), 2015

Metacognition is a cognitive theory defined as a learner's awareness of his or her own learning process. Metacognition is grounded in constructivist theory and gained widespread prominence in the 1970's. The term metacognition evolved from Flavell's (1985) term metamemory. Several components of metacognition include metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences. Students learn to control their learning through the use of metacognitive strategies. Teachers are critical in this process, as they can identify those learners who are novice or learning disabled and are unable to monitor their own process. Research suggests that intervention is critical in the development of students' awareness of how to learn more effectively.

Assignments and Reflections:
Course assignments and learning experiences (artifacts), as well as student reflections are all intended to demonstrate the student’s achievement of learning outcomes and self-reflective learning abilities; includes summative reflections, process reflections, evaluative reflections, interpretive reflections.
http://www.lbcc.edu/Eportfolio/documents/Assignment-Reflect-Faculty-rev2.pdf

The 40 Reflection Questions
Back-ward Looking
Inward-Looking
Outward-Looking
Forward-Looking: 
https://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/stw/edutopia-stw-replicatingPBL-21stCAcad-reflection-questions.pdf

Rivers, B. A., Richardson, J. E., & Price, L. (2014). Promoting Reflection in AsynchronousVirtual Learning Spaces: Tertiary Distance Tutors' Conceptions. International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning,15(3), 215-231. 

Increasingly, universities are embedding reflective activities into the curriculum. With the growth in online tertiary education, how effectively is reflection being promoted or used in online learning spaces? Based on the notion that teachers' beliefs will influence their approaches to teaching, this research sought to understand how a group of distance tutors at the UK Open University conceptualised reflection.
Something to think about - write about?
Coming into Presence: The Unfolding of aMoment
Lynn Fels  Simon Fraser University

 We are always, always being swept along in a moment of becoming. 

Let us for once hold such a moment, brimming again with precious fragile life.  (Dragland, 2008)

"Natality stands for those moments in our lives when we take responsibility for ourselves in relation to others. In this way, natality initiates an active relation to the world. It signifies those moments in our lives (and there are many) in which we attempt to answer the question that Arendt argues is at the basis of all action and that is posed to every newcomer to the world: “Who are you?” (p. 21)

If we are to understand that “action, the ability to interrupt and begin again, bestows meaning on human existence” (Gordon, 2001, p. 43), then we must pay careful attention to the embodied concepts that intertwine our written and embodied texts as we seek to recognize our life’s engagement in all its complexities and complicities. We, wittingly or otherwise, perform those theories that choose us as we learn how to encounter the “unbearable lightness” (Kundera, 1984) of being in this moment of unfolding. We must learn to insist that there is more important business at hand than that demanded by those who would restrain and control. As the character played by Kevin Spacey, a teacher in the movie, Pay it Forward (Abrams & Leder, 2000), tells his grade-seven class,

…there is a world out there…..best you start thinking about the world now and what it means to you…Why should we think about the world?…What does the world expect of you? …Nothing. My God, boys and girls, he’s right. Here you are, you can’t drive, you can’t vote, you can’t even go to the bathroom, without a pass from me….you’re stuck….in the seventh grade. But not forever. Because one day you’ll be free… what if the world is just a big disappointment….unless you take the things that you don’t like about this world and you flip them right upside-down, right on their ass….

He tells his students that they can choose to remain in their current state of disempowerment or, should they wish, they can become pro-active agents in their lives and the lives of others. To this end, he reveals the year’s assignment that he had chalked on the blackboard and hidden behind the map of the world, which he now rolls up with a flourish.