Reflection and teaching: a taxonomy
Henk Vos a,*, John Cowan baUniversity of Twente, POB 217-EWI-BFD, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands. bOpen University of Schotland, Edinburgh
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 53 489 2808; fax: +31 53 489 1065.
E-mail address: h.vos@utwente.nl Abstract
A major problem in teaching reflection is that educational objectives for reflection in terms of student behaviour are lacking. Therefore a taxonomy of reflection has been developed based on Bloom’s taxonomy. Reflective assignments can then be better focused on any chosen educational objectives. The act of reflection has been analysed and abstracted from goal, content, context, means, and moment of reflecting. Reflection was operationalised as answering reflective questions. Bloom’s taxonomy has been analysed, in order to apply this taxonomy to reflective questons. The result is a taxonomy of reflection. Reflection turns out to be basically a comparison of two thoughts.
Keywords: reflection, taxonomy, learning, teaching, questions 1. Introduction
Reflection is a highly valued way of thinking. Reflecting is an important part of professional practice (Schön, 1983), of learning (Kolb, 1984), and a means for metacognitive development (Vos, 2001, Chap. 2 and 6). Students write often reports, personal development portfolio's, reflective journals, etc.. In reflective assignments the students have to think about what they did, how they did it, and why, what they learned from it, and how their knowledge and skills developed.
Nevertheless, few people, including teachers, are inclined to reflect for learning by themselves (Moon, 1999). Teachers who stimulate students to reflect meet many difficulties. It is the experience of the first author that some very clever first year's students do not want to reflect intentionally. They either remark that they already reflect every day, or that they just do not want to reflect. The last category often entails students who have some personal problems and quit the department later in the first year.
This situation gives the impression that sometimes the type of reflection required is too difficult or too threatening; but in other cases reflection is done easily. Probably it is worthwhile to differentiate the demand for the learner in reflecting, and the difficulties for the teachers in facilitating that reflective learning. For we need to understand what are the most easy types of reflection for students, and what topics are the most effective to reflect on at what occasions. This will be of much advantage to us, as facilitative teachers, first of all to be able to talk with colleagues about reflection.
The teacher can then adjust the facilitation of reflection to the state of the students. The teachers can help the students who are beginners to understand what reflection is. The teachers can give assignments in which the students learn to use tools that stimulate their reflection - usefully. The teachers can start with reflective assignments that are easily executed. And the teachers can more effectively give feedback on the students' (reflective) performance (cf. Vos, Mouthaan, Olthuis, & Gommer, 2002) or give an example by reflecting aloud or in writing themselves. Maybe we can use our developing understanding to improve our own reflecting.
To distinguish types of reflection according to difficulty can be viewed as research to solve a categorisation problem (Dijkstra, 1997). For this, the concept of reflection and the use of reflection in different contexts, including teaching, have been analysed. The taxonomy of Bloom for the cognitive domain (1956) that orders educational objectives according to the complexity (and thus difficulty) of observable students behaviour in tasks has been analysed for an application to reflective questions. This taxonomy of reflective questions is presented by a description of levels of reflection. Then these descriptions are analysed to find the nature of the basic activity in reflection. Finally the validity of
this analysis and some consequences of it for educational research and teaching reflection to students are discussed.
2. Reflection and reflecting
The word reflection may denote a concept that can be explained by a set of examples or by a definition. Other meanings refer to a phenomenon in human brains, a method or technique of thinking, a mental action, or a process in a specific brain. It could also mean the result of such an activity. The activity can be transitive, analogous to the reflection of light by a mirror (mirroring); or intransitive, like thinking. Being reflective is a characteristic of persons that not necessarily involves a high ability to reflect. Rogers (2001) and Lee (2005) give an overview and analysis of important literature on reflection. In this paper reflection is taken to mean the process of reflecting.
According to Dewey (1933), reflection can be described as “the kind of thinking that consists in turning a subject over in the mind, and giving it serious thought.”, a kind of mulling over a subject. Moon (1999) defines “reflection” as “ … a form of mental processing with a purpose and/or an anticipated outcome that is applied to relatively complicated or uncomplicated ideas for which there is not an obvious solution” the process being initiated “in a state of doubt, uncertainty or difficulty”.
The stance of Moon is that apparent differences in reflection are not due to different types of reflection; but this stance depends strongly on how you define 'different'. For Dewey, reflection seems to be a kind of unfocused mental action, while for Moon reflection starts somewhere, and serves a purpose that looks much like solving a problem. Moons descriptions relate the mental activity of reflecting to its motives, its outcome, its origins, and/ or the objects to which it is applied. With respect to the activity itself, Moon gives no hints, while Dewey says that a subject is turned over in the mind.
Then several questions arise. Can reflection be considered as an intentional activity that solves or tempts to solve a problem? And if so, what types of problems that reflection may solve can be distinguished? Has this activity a structure? A start? An end? Can constitutent parts of this action be specified? Are there different types of reflection? How do these differ, and in what ways are they similar? An important question here is whether reflection as it is used in the learning cycle of Kolb (1984), and reflection as it is used in practice (Schön, 1983) are different types of reflection or not. A further question is where and how (and if) to relate self-evaluation to one or both of these.
Clear answers to these questions are not evident at present. Finding an answer to such questions, or even a part of an answer, and even beginning a search for an answer, seem useful in order to turn reflection from an unfocused activity into an activity that is focused on an outcome that addresses a problem (cf. Vos and Vlas, 2000). This development of ability for reflection may be partially natural, but can probably be fostered by education and in turn is supposed to develop all human functioning.
Reflection can be used in several ways in teaching: for solving an immediate problem at hand in practice, for improving your teaching (i.e. learning and personal development), and for learning to reflect. As professionals, the teachers may use reflection in action in the sense described by Schön (1983); in learning from their experiences, they may use reflection on action in the sense of Kolb (1984); learning to reflect (Vos et al., 2002) requires more attention and is mostly approached as learning by doing. These three uses of reflection are no different from the use of reflection by students, though on different goals and with different criteria of effectiveness.
For engineering students, reflection on the role of the teacher, as a co-operative contribution to learning, or on the role of fellow students, in co-operative problem solving, is difficult because that is not what students expect to deal with in class. But reflection on the roles of other people and one's interactions with them is useful, if not necessary before one can reflect fully on different approaches to a problem and to learning, and thus on one's own approach. Similar considerations apply to other students.
It will be clear that the object of reflection plays a role, alongside any inherent difficulty of reflection. The objects (content) we distinguish include topic or domain (educational science for teachers), co-operation (with peers, or others), strategy to solve problems, and self. So the topic or object of reflection (with an anticipated outcome), the time of reflection (before, during or after a task), and the purpose (to solve a problem at hand, or to learn for the future) may make reflection less or more difficult for a specific person, alongside structure of reflective thinking itself.
To analyse the structure of reflection the concept of reflection has been abstracted from its goals, its contents, and other contextual elements of reflection. Levels of difficulty in reflective thinking must not be confused with levels in the act of abstraction (Van Parreren, 1979; Vos, 1987), which represent a different dimension in thinking and played a helpful role here.
The inherent levels of difficulty in reflection dwell in the complexity of the reflective behaviour that is needed. Consequently becoming better in reflection, i.e. learning to reflect, involves a
development not only in the objects one is able to reflect on (generalisation), but also in the inherent difficulty of the reflective problems one is able to tackle. Therefore one needs a taxonomy of reflective problems.
3. Towards a taxonomy of reflective problems
We suggest an ordering of the types of reflection in accordance with the difficulty of the reflective task that is involved would be helpful. From experience with reflective practices, Cowan (2004) has described and identified four apparent different types of reflection. These were supposedly ordered from easy to difficult uses of reflection, and from more supposedly common to less common types. By considering reflection as an educational objective, it should become possible to order the types of reflection according to the intended student behaviour. The taxonomy of Bloom was used by the first author to find an order based on the complexity of this behaviour because complexity and difficulty are related there.
Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives of the cognitive domain (Bloom, 1956; Anderson & Sosniak, 1994) was intended to provide for classification of the goals of an educational system. It was especially intended to help discuss curricular and evaluation problems with greater precision. The reaction to the taxonomy was a shift from concern about teacher's action to a concern for what students learned from these actions, in terms of evidence for that learning in observable behaviour. Programs with educational objectives that can be specified in terms of intended student behaviour can be classified.
Cognitive objectives were ordered from the simplest behaviour to the most complex. Knowledge or information is the primary and basic educational objective in almost every curriculum. Knowledge means in the taxonomy that the students can give evidence that they remember, either by recalling or by recognising, some idea, or phenomenon with which they had experience in the educational process. Next most teachers would like some evidence that the students can do something with their
knowledge. This is called "critical thinking", "reflective thinking", or "problem solving", and is referred to by the general term "intellectual abilities and skills" in the taxonomy. Six major classes of educational objectives are distinguished: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.
Reflection has been operationalised in this research as the thinking process that takes place in answering reflective questions. The application of Bloom's taxonomy was done in two steps. First, the descriptions of Bloom's levels have been applied to the educational objective “the student should be able to answer questions about a certain topic” and the student behaviour “answering those questions”. As questions of the students themselves, after a task or communication has been presented to them, the taxonomy can be viewed as follows. The words "what" and "it" refer to the content. Between brackets the hypothetical mental process involved. The lines have to be read in a cumulative sense, that is a line includes the former lines.
Taxonomy of questions of the students.
1. What? What is this? What do I recall? (raising task awareness) → Knowledge
2. What more? What is there more to the communication? What could I add? (brainstorming) → Comprehension
3. Where? Where does it fit in the context? Where do I apply it without being prompted? (focusing) → Application
4. How? What elements can be found? How can I apply it here? (searching) → Analysis 5. Towards what? What is to be made? What do I have to construct? (designing) → Synthesis 6. How well? Has it had any value? How good, useful, etc. is it? (comparing) → Evaluation
Examples of this classification of questions according to Bloom's taxonomy are given by Riegle (1976). It must be stressed that this entire taxonomy of questions lies on level two of the present taxonomy of reflection (see section 4.2).
Secondly, this framework has been applied to reflective questions, i.e. questions applied to and focused on thinking processes. The four types of reflection which have been mentioned were put into the taxonomy of Bloom (levels 3 to 6), their descriptions adjusted, and the missing types of reflection (levels 1 and 2) were added to generate a consistent and integrated hierarchy of reflective questions.
Using the taxonomy of Bloom in this way to distinguish different levels of reflection will help the teaching profession to promote reflection in several ways. First because it provides a complete hierarchy of problems so any missing types of reflection can be identified. Second, because lower level types are easier reflection. Third, because lower level demands are the more common ones and can be used as a step to make people at ease with reflection. Fourth, to measure or identify in research the ability of the students in reflecting according to the level of reflection.
4. Levels of reflection
Six types or levels of reflection will be discussed here, corresponding to the six levels in Bloom's taxonomy. For each level of reflection, questions to facilitate reflection and questions to facilitate learning will be presented.
The six levels of reflection will be characterised by describing reflective behaviour at each level, and by giving examples and non-examples of questions facilitating reflection and of questions
facilitating learning. The outcome of the activity of reflection (for the learner) and the purpose (for the teacher) will be indicated, and the way the outcome can work to attain the purpose. In this way it is easier to differentiate between several types of reflecting in teaching. In addition the difference between each type and the next one will be defined by specifying a question whose answer, yes or no, will decide if the example is on the present or the next higher level.
4.1. Recognising reflection and remembering what reflection is.
This is the level of knowledge. The question to be answered here is: "Which examples of reflection do you know?", or "Is reflection involved in this case or not?" The educational objective at this level is being able to identify reflection. It may involve knowing what happens inside a person when one reflects. This level involves recalling examples of reflection and its characteristics. The outcome is simply an identification of a case of reflection. The purpose is an awareness of reflective activities so that they can be identified when they occur.
Examples of reflective performances on this level are the following. Knowing that reflection is involved when answering questions that require thinking, such as "What is time?" but not questions whose answer everybody knows, that go without thinking, or can be looked up, like "What time is it?" Other examples of reflective questions at this level are "How are students to be motivated?" But not "Did the student hand in his homework?" Or "What is self-regulation?". Asking the right question requires a lot of experience and involvement of teachers.
To stimulate reflection the question should be one for which no direct answer is available for the student, but that the student really needs to be able to answer because of formal requirements, or better, really wants to answer out of curiosity. A teacher and a student must be aware that answering the question "What is reflection?" with a definition from a book, or a description given by a teacher, neither shows an understanding of the concept of reflection nor present an example of reflection. Whether a question leads to reflection or not, thus depends on the prior knowledge the students have. Without direct prior knowledge reflection may emerge, but only when the students are willing to put effort in answering the question, and are able to do it.
On this level one should become aware of a thinking process different from recalling a topic and be able to recall such a thinking process itselve. The difference between this level and the next one can be defined as follows: Does reflective performance go beyond recalling (reflective) thinking processes; can I explain reflection when asked questions about it?
The question to be answered on the level of comprehension is: "What do the various types of reflection entail?" To do this, one should be able to distinguish different types of reflection, both in theory and in practice, such as mulling infinitely over and around in circles, and purposeful reflection that gives at least partial answers to unclear or difficult questions. One should be able to relate
reflection to thinking and learning, and to detach it from psychiatric treatment or meddling in personal affairs. At this level one is able to explain reflection in one's own words, to interpret reflective
incidents, and to extrapolate one's understanding to other cases of reflection (outcome). The purpose is to make a communication and a discussion about reflection possible.
Different types of reflection on this level can be related to answering different types of thinking questions, like: What is learning? What are your strong and weak points according to this test? How do water molecules behave in a tsunami water wave and how can your pupils simulate that in class? How can you best represent your ideas on a topic? The types of reflection involved may not be something of which the learner is aware, and can be open to discussion. They can be described respectively as: Looking mentally inside for related ideas on learning; Searching for personal experiences that relate to the test items and seeing your behaviour reflected (mirrored) in the test results; Imagining yourself inside the water wave, feeling what you would feel when being a water molecule; Creating a form (words, symbols, drawing, animation, etc.) that reflects (mirrors) your ideas.
It is difficult for a teacher to demonstrate the skill of reflecting by reflecting aloud. Neither is giving prescriptions for reflecting easy. But when the students repeat this demonstration or follow the prescriptions their skill belongs to this level.
Comprehension of reflection requires different experiences with thinking, and maybe an awareness of the difference of processes involved. Otherwise, the given descriptions could have been learned by heart only, but not stated in the students’own words or used to correctly identify new and useful examples of reflection. Asking the students to explain how they did something they are good at, or very interested in, usually will produce explanations that can be identified as reflective, and can be used to generate examples for understanding reflection.
Thinking is not always reflective. Examples are the thinking involved in making a summary or in analysing a text, a schematic, a technical drawing or a formula. In these cases the mental activities are bound to the given forms in a communication.
The difference between this level and the next one can be defined as follows:
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4.3. Critical incident analysis (CIA).
CIA is a simple and straightforward application of reflection. The inherent question is “What is important for me to take from this incident, beyond the occasion itself?” Here people reflect on experiences which puzzle, surprise, challenge, or worry them. It involves an analysis of other processes than thinking. How did these proceed? What was the important feature? And then maybe: How did that touch me? There is no analysis involved of the process of reflection itself. The
developing skill of reflection is to be applied in a new concrete situation, on new objects. CIA leads to an awareness of objects to reflect on.
The challenge of the critical incident may be within the content of a task e.g. when a dilemma or a contradiction is subject to discussion, or dealing with disruptive behaviour of a partner one has to co-operate with, or the emotions involved in an incident of harassment. What makes the incident a critical one depends on how the person himself is involved. A surprisingly insufficient mark for an
examination, the preparation for which had taken a lot of effort, might be a critical incident.
Questions that facilitate reflection in CIA are: What happened exactly? What did you get from this event, incident, or task? What is the evidence for your statement? Here the students become aware that there is a difference between an opinion, conclusion, or feeling (the examination was unfair), and the data on which it is based (requirements). Reflection can be assumed when the students become excited, give long and detailed explanations of what happened, or are surprised by some details of
their answers – and show evidence of the thoughts prompted by that answers, and possibly of lessons thus learnt for the future.
Reflection can also be facilitated by series of questions. An example is the sequence of responsible thinking questions used to change the behaviour of disruptive students: What are you doing? What are the rules? What happens when you break the rules? Is this what you want to happen? What do you want to do now? etc. (Ford, 2003). Posing a dilemma, a contradiction, or a confrontation to the students also helps them to reflect on this level. When students use the skill of reflection correctly, given an appropriate situation in which no mode of solution is specified, they demonstrate mastery at the this level.
The outcome is maybe just an understanding of the incident, or being able to accept it as a life experience. The outcome exposes a factor that was important but was overlooked. The purpose here is to become aware of nonconscious factors in the critical incident. However, the failure to pass may be blamed to the examination. The student then stays engaged in the particular incident. So CIA does not necessarily lead to learning.
For learning a move from the particular to the general is needed. To focus CIA on learning, special measures have to be taken, like asking what the student would do better next time if such an incident would happen again or would happen in a different context. Facilitating such a move is difficult for a teacher because imagining the critical incident to happen again can be threatening to the student. If facilitation succeeds the outcome is an idea, concept, rule, procedure, that can be used or applied or tested (active experimentation, Kolb) a next time. Then the purpose is to become aware of what you can learn from the critical incident.
The difference between this level of reflection and the next one can be defined as follows:
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4.4. Process analysis.This type of reflection analyses how similar tasks are undertaken. This is an analysis of one's own (my) processes, of what goes on inside one's mind. How do I process in executing similar tasks? Being an analysis of my processes, it may also involve the reflective processes themselves. How do I reflect on what I do? Reflection here involves a breakdown of self-processes into their constituent parts or elements and detection of the relationships of the parts and the way they are organised.
Skill in analysis includes, for example, being able to distinguish fact from hypothesis, relevant from extraneous material, to note how one idea relates to another, and to see what unstated
assumptions are involved in what is said or written. This type of analysis of an incident was already required in CIA, but now it should be applied to thinking processes themselves, giving insight in the arrangement and structure of thoughts which hold thinking processes together.
The challenge here lies in identifying the general approach to tackling similar tasks – e.g. because of repeated failures or maybe the opposite, successes -, or in the need to understand oneself – e.g. because some not intended behaviour recurs - . The outcome is a recognised structure for some recurrent mental process. The purpose is to improve performance (e.g. to manage time more
effectively), or to describe performance (e.g. in order to improve the processes, or to simulate them by computing).
Questions to facilitate this type of reflection include: What did you get from these tasks? How did you do it? What was important? Why? Why did you do this task? Such questions can often with much profit be discussed in small groups of students. Questions for the facilitator himself are "Will my questions or comments help the students to improve their problem solving ability, learning, or reflecting?" and "How?"
A question for learning is “How can you do it better?”. In learning and development, the process analysis will improve performance through two elements - first by the generalisation that emerges from the analysis; but then also in the deliberate decision to actively experiment, to carry out that generalisation into new but similar experiences, and to test it out there. Thus, from time to time, the generalisation will need to be developed further and made more mature.
The second writer often analyses the way he decides to make facilitative comments on students' reflective writings. That generalisation serves him well - in three ways. Usually, it quickly becomes a
habit, and he does not think about it every time he does whatever it is. Then there is the way he goes back to the generalisation when he is faced with a slightly unusual challenge, and sees how he can make it fit, or needs to adapt it. Finally, there is the situation where the generalisation doesn't fit, and he must re-reflect, and re-generalise.
Process analysis is more personal and more demanding than CIA. To use it in learning requires a smaller step, however, because the students have already got a process structure with weak and strong elements identified. The teacher then goes on to ask the students to use such an analytical approach by themselves, or asks questions like "What if you do it otherwise? What are you going to do next time?" Thus process analysis entails analysis, and then - for learning - creative effort to engage in active experimentation with one's own processes, which is the checking out of the generalisation, rather than simply blindly drawing conclusions about one's particular behaviour, as on level 3. Creativity and imagination is needed here for learning, to work out "How will I check?"
The difference between this level and the next one can be defined as follows:
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4.5. Open reflection.Reflection can be open in that we do not know, when we begin, where it will or should take us. For example, we may set out to consider how to act in a given situation, but without knowing if we will be able to identify options for action, let alone choose between them. We may set out seeking meaning or understanding, without knowing if we can find it, and even without knowing why we started. Here both the origin of the puzzlement and the outcome of reflection may be questioned. The issue or question to reflect on has to be constructed as we reflect. Questions of open reflection are questions that concern learners' issues of immediate importance of whose full significance they may not be aware when reflection commences.
The outcome is often a question, an answer to which may help the learners to take a further step in the solution of a problem, or a hypothesis about the reason why they are puzzled that serves the same goal. Another outcome may be a new representation that may help them to pursue the solving of the puzzle. The outcome (question, hypothesis, or form) must embody somehow at least some vital elements of the puzzle or of the reflection process itself, and thus lessen the puzzlement. In open questions, as in all reflections, the purpose is to go at least part of the way towards finding an answer of which we were unaware when we started.
What is the question for reflection? What is the point to reflect on? This type of reflection has a question or an issue to consider, with the indeterminate result of this consideration as the outcome. What shall I do next? The questions when asked involve an uncertainty both about whether they can be answered and whether the answer will ease the puzzling.
Reflecting here entails creatively generating or synthesising (constructing) a question or a problem. One has to see an issue in the puzzle that can lead to a solution. It is a hypothesis that, if true or answered, will contribute to solving the puzzling issue. The difficulty lies here in the uncertainty about whether answering the question will help or not, strengthened by the uncertainty about what it is that is puzzling you. In this type of reflection, the outcome is not clear in the beginning, neither the outcome of reflection nor the outcome of learning. The purpose is to continue reflection, but now from a carefully considered question which has emerged during the process of reflection, and may then lead to meaning, understanding, further actions, etc.
Questions to facilitate this process are "Can you pose a question about what you think? What are you hoping to find out? Why do you spend time on this?" and then, for continuing reflection "How would knowing the answer to that question make a difference?" A teacher could ask himself "Would my questions help the students to ask questions by themselves?"
Here the students easily become their own teachers by asking the question "What can I learn from my puzzling over something?" The purpose often is to learn to reflect in order to add value to the state of puzzling by means of (a part of) an answer to a specific question that has been formulated.
The learners here have to spot a question, which is potentially fruitful as a starting point - pinpointing what troubles them, or should trouble them, like “What are my learning goals here and now?”. They then have to problem-solve, which is creative - and to summarise the outcome, which is analytical.
The difference between this level and the next one can be defined as follows:
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4.6. Self-evaluation of reflection.This is an evaluative ordering of my processes in terms of usefulness for a given outcome or purpose. How well do I reflect? What is the value of my questioning, my reflecting? Here how well reflective tasks are being performed is analysed and what their profits are. Self-evaluation entails generating, selecting, and applying criteria for reflection, making judgements by very careful
considerations of the various aspects of the object being judged, and then - creatively - deciding what these judgements imply.
The difficulty may be positioned in the self, the behaviour of the actor himself, here. The outcome is a judgement. The purpose is to generate and apply criteria for the evaluation of reflection. Once formulated, these criteria may easily be used to match further performance to these criteria, next time. Reflection on this level is also generating meaning to reflection. It contributes to understanding why one chooses to reflect.
The purpose for teachers here is again two-fold. First, and one that we often disregard, is to encourage students and all of us to be aware of our strengths, so that we are empowered to use them to good effect. The second writer has often been told, and facts seem to confirm, that, electronically, students will come to trust him, and take a lot from that relationship (Cowan, 2006). He needs to evaluate himself under that heading, and recognise what seems a strength - and understand what contributes to it.
At the same time, and more importantly, self-evaluation leads us to see scope for improvement, and even ways of improving. John wants his students to self-evaluate, but then he wants them to go on and think about what that evaluation suggests to them, not only in terms of future action but also in terms of further reflection. Is my reflecting good enough to learn, or do I have to improve it?
For such empowerment a feeling of trust is needed, trust in the teacher and trust in oneself. It comes to common values, to respect and self-respect, and to a stronger self. On the lowest level recognition of reflection from among other kinds of mental processes is the case; but on the present level, being engaged in reflecting can be used as a criterion in a reflexive way. On the highest level of this taxonomy persons are aware that they are reflecting persons, they highly value their reflective capabilities, while knowing that reflection is not all that there is to (meta)cognition, just like they knew on the lowest level.
5. Results, analysis, and discussion
On the lowest level in the taxonomy, thinking induced by a given concrete question may be compared with some memories of reflection. Knowledge is based on a first awareness of what reflecting entails. A definition or a description of reflection may play a role. On level two,
understanding of different descriptions and cases of reflection can be discussed and compared, leading to or arising from an awareness of different types of reflection, and to a more flexible concept of what reflection is. On level three, reflective thinking is applied to an incident, until one identifies that a certain factor was significant. Moving through the first three levels a person grows stepwise more aware of the existence and use of a type of thinking called reflection.
On the next level, in process analysis, the mental processes of reflection are applied to other (similar) recurrent processes until these processes can be divided in subprocesses and intermediate states like walking can be divided in steps and footmarks. The structures of mental processes emerge significantly. On level five, reflection on a puzzled state of mind is used to generate a kind of hypothesis about what might be the cause of the puzzlement. If the question is answered, and the puzzlement is lessened, the hypothesis turns out to be correct. If not, the puzzling should have refined the question –usefully-. Finally, in self-evaluation the thinking processes themselves are evaluated and subjected to constructive judgement according to objective criteria. Across the topmost three levels, a person grows stepwise more aware of the structure, origins, and value of that thinking process called reflection.
Intentional reflection seems to lead to an awareness of something that was not obvious in the beginning. Reflective questions can be used by a teacher or a peer student to focus reflective thinking. The questions obviously contain elements (prompts) that the student should hold in mind when at the same time a subject (with related ideas, images, or emotions) is turned over in that mind. Somehow a similarity between the ideas generated by the prompts and the subject should trigger an outcome of reflection. So reflection must involve a comparison of two mental processes - the status quo and a possible option.
Somehow the human brain is able either to monitor two mental processes on line, or to compare two mental processes that went on, or to hold two representations of its own processes and compare these, and to find elements that can be judged as equivalent or even equal. These are metacognitive activities since metacognition can simply be defined as cognition about cognition. From this
viewpoint, reflection leads to metacognitive knowledge, that is knowledge about one's own cognitive processes (Vos, 2001, chap. 3).
The basic structure of reflection is thus that two thoughts are compared to find out in how far one thought mirrors the other. Such a thought can be a conceptual attribution, a mental image, or a logical process, about an event, situation, feelings, experiences, observable objects, or observations. The conclusion that two thoughts mirror each other can be considered as a kind of short-circuiting that develops in the brain.
The stance of Moon (1999) is that apparent differences in reflection are not due to different types of reflection. According to the analysis given above, this could be interpreted as meaning that essentially all types of reflection involve a comparison of two (or more) mental processes in some way. This analysis also explains why one needs others to learn to reflect: They provide both mirrors for one's own reflection and examples of (someone's else's) reflection. In practical cases the mirrors are generated by tools, or socio-constructively by other students, or the teacher himself, serving as a mirror.
Different forms of reflection arise because the object (content) differs. Self-reflection for instance is reflection on the person self. When self-reflection is said to have different levels according to whether behaviour or personal traits are considered (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2002), these levels are different from the present levels. Self-reflection can take place on our level one if persons remember that thinking about the way they are hand-writing letters is a form of reflection.
Other forms of reflection arise because of differences in moment (after, during, or before an action), in goal (to solve a problem, to repeat a success, or to learn), in method (scenario -, line -, spiral-reflection, coaching, personal development planning etc.), and in tools (using notes, sketches, tape recorder, video recorder). Thus Schon’s reflection-in-action and Kolbs reflection-on-action just differ in moment of reflection and in goal (to solve problems and to learn, respectively), but basically are the same.
Some general conditions to teach reflection with impact are that the student should not be afraid to reflect, should want to reflect because they like it or see the use of it, and should be able to reflect explicitly. The easiest way to entice students to reflect lies in establishing a starting point at levels one and two, in reflection on why they came to university, and what for, and then to extend that reflection to their study. Such reflection can be formally required as a part of the curriculum (Vos et al., 2002).
The failure to engage in intentional reflection on the part of both teachers (Moon, 1999) requires further investigation: it seems unlikely that teachers do not reflect. Maybe they do it in a different form, type, or level. It is the first author's opinion that all people do reflect, but they often do not know it, and usually their reflection is not about the topics of school learning but about other issues. If the first two levels of reflection are overlooked, CIA indeed is the most common type of reflection (Gibbs, 1992).
The taxonomy of reflection here is related to questions and to the cognitive domain. Its character is therefore normative, embedded in the empirical-analytical approach of the social sciences, with the related ideas about knowledge and practice. In this respect this taxonomy lies on the lowest of the three levels of reflectivity that Van Manen (1977) distinguished.
The difference between reflective and other questions is that reflective questions are directed on cognitive goals here, and not on affective goals (although emotions can play an important role in reflection) or other goals (cf. Gall, 1970, who also suggests criteria for the quality of the answer to
higher order questions). Nor do we consider possible reflection in questions like "Will you please open the window?" or "Do you like ice cream?" (Riegle, 1976).
According to Travers (1980), Bloom's taxonomy lacks a the theoretical underpinning of true taxonomies such as those in chemistry or biology. This is one of the reasons why validation of the taxonomy turned out to be difficult. This problem is related to the issue of the process-content distinction. Complexity of content may interfere with complexity of the process shown in behaviour. The challenge is how to distinguish between the complexity of the behaviour itself, and the complexity of the content of that behaviour. The present contribution to this question is to apply the skill of thinking to the skill of thinking itself.
6. Conclusions
The levels of reflection described form a basis for further research on reflection and for
improvement of teaching. For further research it is interesting to elaborate on mirroring and reflexivity as special forms of reflecting. Reflecting on reflection (Von Wright, 1992) gives a start. Also, the taxonomy should be validated empirically. The same problems are expected here as with the validation of the taxonomy of Bloom, but they may be better observable. Research concerning the frequency of occurrence of the different types of reflection for different populations, different goals, and different content, is lacking but can be of value both for a theoretical understanding of reflection and for teaching.
The levels presented describe states in the development of the ability to solve reflective problems. This does not mean that a person has to pass through these levels successively to learn to reflect. The levels are not generative for the development of a person. Neither does it mean that everybody is able to progress from one level to the next in a way similar to the stepwise development of thinking (see e.g. Van Parreren & Carpay, 1980). This possibility can only be confirmed by teaching experiments.
Good teachers of reflection not only provide effective prompts, but do more. Learning to reflect involves becoming less dependent on the teacher by generating the prompting questions for yourself, by applying these at different times, to more objects, by using them in more contexts, by learning to use more tools, and by solving reflective problems of increasing difficulty. The teachers should assist the students to be less dependent on help and still lead them through the steps mentioned before.
The teachers have to make the students aware of their reflections outside school settings, to teach them to know and understand reflection in school settings, and then to apply reflection to useful learning in school. Such an approach to teaching reflection puts heavy demands on teachers and students alike (see e.g. Cowan, 2001: The first steps for the Inverness Five). It is highly urgent to develop simpler tools to let people know and understand reflection as a first step to applying
reflection. The above analysis may support further fundamental and applied educational research on reflection.
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