While most of us know that reflection is a key to helping students learn new information, many people don't have a practical model to use when facilitating reflection exercises with their students. Let's examine a 4 step learning model and how it might benefit students in any setting.

Step 1: The Experience
This could be anything.  Maybe it's a test, a group project, a guest speaker, a lecture, a worksheet, or recess. Anything can be reflected upon for the sake of gaining valuable applicable insights.

Step 2: Observation (What)
As facilitators we often call this step the "what" step, because we ask a lot of questions that begin with that word. What just happened? What emotions did you feel?  What was challenging about the activity? What behaviors did you notice?  This is a time to observe the observable. Things like what people said to each other or how someone reacted to a rise in anxiety are excellent things to examine in this step.

Step 3: Add Meaning (So What)
People have a set of learned lenses that we use to examine life and add meaning to our experiences. In this step we take the observable data that we've talked about in step 2 and synthesize it into some conclusions about the experience. We call this step "so what" because we examine our behavior or the information gained during the experience and ask, "So what does this mean for our life, team, world, etc?" This is a key step for the facilitator to affect life change because this is where the lenses our students use when making decisions will come to the surface. The greatest degree of impact you can make in your limited interactions with students will come from challenging the lenses they see the world through. While giving information is great, changes in behavior, how they actually react to and use that information, will only come through changes in how they see their worlds.

Step 4:  Application (Now What)
At NLR we tell our facilitators that if we spend an hour doing a team building exercise and don't end that time with application, we've just wasted an hour of everyone's life. What good is an experience if it is never applied in a meaningful and practical way? This step seeks to help people move toward applying new information by asking the questions, "Now that we've had our experience and discovered something meaningful about it, what should our response be? How do we live differently with this new information?" Remember that life changing application doesn't have to be the stereotypical touchy feely moment that you may think of (although there's nothing wrong with that), but that any small behavior change has large implications in daily living. Something as routine as an elementary student deciding to apply information and always begin a new sentence with a capitol letter is a big deal that will influence them for the rest of their lives.  

Confucius is quoted as saying, "Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection with study is dangerous."  May we, as people with influence over others, use reflection as a tool to do what we do more effectively.  And for those of you who are wrapping up the summer and preparing for another long school year, use these tools yourself.  What happened this year?  What does that mean?  What can you change in yourself to do an even more excellent job in the future? 
 
For a more in depth look at critical reflection you can read this article:  http://agelesslearner.com/intros/experiential.html