Model of reflection: The Ellmers Model

Hi there my name is Dr. Grant Ellmers and I work in the creative arts, what was called creative arts. And so I teach primarily into the photography and design disciplines. However, with my reflective practice and process interests that also has applications across some of the broader degrees. So why do I use reflection in my subjects?

I mean, I teach design and photography, and that's what I have a level of expertise in and the students come to actually learn about. And so why this this focus on reflection as well? And that's really come out of my experience teaching over a number of years where I could see that students weren't linking their learning and their thinking between projects. And so I first noticed this at the senior level and where I'm directing students to actually start to pull together in the capstone subjects, what it is they’ve done to give their learning some meaning to hopefully then help them, or, and let them, inform how they step forward out of their degree into the into the industry. And I was surprised that a lot of students found that problematic. And I think a lot of them hadn't been asked that. And so I started to actually unpack that. I and doing some research and some reading, I could see that, oh, well, I've read that a lot of what we do, that knowledge is actually bound within the project, within the experience, and it's a recognized phenomena that in fact then that learning is not necessarily explicit or in an explicit form that the students can actually access. And so that led to me to, well, let's introduce some reflection to target that learning that's embedded in the project experience.

The four-stage reflective model that I developed through my PhD involves a series of prompts to help the learner um critically reflect on their project. So the four levels involve, firstly, the student describes what they do or what they've done. No higher order thinking at all is just, I did this. I did that as quite deliberate in the way that that set up because it brings the learner back into the space which taps into the principles of reflection on action articulated by Schön and also by other design researchers around this notion of structured reflection. And one of those key principles is that there's a deliberate pause. And by getting or asking students to describe what they've done is a good way to help them pause.

The second level is where you ask them to identify a significant moment. And importantly, it's for them. It's not what the teacher thinks might be the case, but actually what they feel is a significant moment. And this brings in this second or slightly higher level of thinking called judgment. So you're asking them to make a judgment on their experience, a judgment on their process and what they have described. And then from that analysis, the next level up, the third level is where you ask them to link that thinking with thinking about how they might proceed further in their project, what might they do next.

So what have they thought about or learned from what they've done to how that might feed into the next stage of the development of their project? The key thing here is very much within the context of the project. And I say that because level four or stage four is then actually asking the students to consider what how this learning or this experience or this thinking a bit about their experience that they've been doing, how this might actually inform their approach to their practice in a more broader context, like their profession.

I've been teaching reflection for a while now, or embedding it or including it in my subjects, and there's certainly some things that I've learned through doing it. Timing is important where you do it, whether it's a weekly or fortnightly. But doing that in a consistent manner. And another part of that lesson I learned was also making sure that the scale of reflection is not overwhelming. And that's why I don't think you can say, always do this particular amount of reflection, because it's very much determined by the subject, the timing of the subject, the level of that subject, 100 versus 300, for instance.

So it’s certainly about timing and scale. And I've also found that it's really effective to do lots of little bits so that you can keep these sort of little small chunks going on because then it's very much it's very doable. Regular, small chunks of reflection. And then the other approach that I like to then incorporate is that at the end there is an overarching reflection done and again, on a scale that's appropriate for the subject where you ask the students then to actually pull those little pieces together and make some broader observations from that.

My final advice is to be flexible around reflection. Yes, I think reflection is a fabulous tool, but it needs to be applied in an appropriate manner and which means that it's not necessarily always the same for every different subject. And to do it in these smaller chunks and that students are doing it at the end of the day. So whatever model or process that you implement is the key is that they're doing it. And so if they're not, then maybe you need to actually reframe or redesign how you might be incorporating the reflection into your subjects or to work alongside what it is that you're doing.