Learning From Experience

I have never taught subjects that are life or death, but it sometimes becomes clearer when providing an example that is. Explaining why as well as providing students with multiple real life scenarios to problem solve in the classroom are one way to help students reflect on past experiences they have had, or be more prepared for when they do encounter the scenario in the future.

“Learning from one’s experience involves not just reflection, but critical reflection.”

My first thought after reflecting on this is that we should probably spend more time reflecting and less time doing, which would actually result in much more intelligent and efficient methods. After critically reflecting on this process, I realized the reason we don’t do this is because ‘time is money’ in the real world and decisions need to be made yesterday. I would still argue a greater amount of time should be allocated towards critical reflection to improve efficiency as much as possible.

This quote has encouraged me to critically reflect on my student’s progress throughout courses and to evaluate my teaching to help improve my lessons for the future. Some ways I plan to incorporate critical reflection into my classes are to:

Create exercises for students to critically evaluate their own progress, by reflecting back on previously taught material. I can have them correlate what they knew previously with what they know now.
I can reflect back to previously taught materials in my lectures and demonstrations to help students critically evaluate what they have learned.
I can use scenarios that students may have encountered previously in their lives to relate to the content I am teaching them and provide them the opportunity to think about how they would handle the same situation now, knowing the new content
I know that I learn best from making mistakes, by creating an activity where I deliberately lead my students to make a mistake (not by teaching them incorrect methods of course) and then assist them to get out of the situation. This provides the student a perfect opportunity to critically evaluate what went wrong.