Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on reflective learning in higher education, and a corresponding incorporation of reflective learning assessments into coursework at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Reflecting as an entrepreneur
A practical question for educators is, how can we scaffold reflective learning in our teaching to help students develop their reflective competencies, essentially allowing them to ‘reflect on reflecting’?
This is a question I have faced as I continue to develop and refine my unit of study, SIEN6006 Entrepreneurship, a relatively new offering with the Master of Commerce developed though the Connected Learning at Scale (CLaS) initiative within the Business School. Essentially, SIEN6006 approaches entrepreneurship as a process, working differently in different contexts with different meanings for different people, and includes sub-topics on sustainable, technological, medical, and cultural entrepreneurship.
Reflective competencies are valuable for entrepreneurship practitioners (Bird, 2019; Tikkamaki et al, 2018). Initiatives to develop such are called for in entrepreneurship education literature (e.g., Chui et al, 2023; Clinkard, 2018; Neergaard et al, 2020) and relevant industry reports (e.g., Innovation & Science Australia, 2022; World Economic Forum of Future Jobs Report, 2023).
Reflective assessment
As such, a critical reflection essay assignment was incorporated into SIEN6006 at the end of semester in place of a traditional final exam. There are reflective eLearning resources incorporated into the final Canvas module of semester, consisting of a written piece on what it means to reflect, a series of videos on reflection in business education and practice, a breakdown of selected reflective frameworks such as the ‘5Rs of reflective practice’ (Bain et al., 2002), and a guide to writing reflectively.
While these resources are useful, there is a lack of ‘low stakes’ (Rodgers, 2002b) reflective exercises earlier in semester to help students prepare for their final ‘high stakes’ assignment. Additionally, the Canvas resources lend themselves to ‘passive learning’ (Stewart Wingfield & Black, 2005) or ‘learning by acquisition’ (Laurillard, 2013) in that students are not really required to meaningfully engage with them in their current format.
To read more about the common challenges of reflective learning in entrepreneurship education, visit ‘Can poster assignments improve the student learning experience? Benefits for students and educators‘.
Using EdTech tools to enhance reflective practice
To help address these issues, I have developed reflective activities that can be incorporated into existing Canvas modules at various points of semester to help facilitate reflection.
I created discussion text areas on Canvas pages to promote student engagement through reactions to a question. This is like a discussion board that can be directly plugged into a particular point in Canvas content, rather than operate as a standalone page at the end of a Canvas module. It can therefore prompt students to reflect on specific concepts or frameworks, in an organic, more conversational low-stakes manner, compared to a traditional formalised essay format.
For example, the ‘principles of responsible innovation’ are introduced on Canvas in module 3. At the bottom of this section, with an appropriate prompt, students informally reflect on whether such principles are relevant for entrepreneurs, and share their thoughts with other students.
I have also used a tool called Atomic Journals, to insert a text box at a relevant point on a Canvas page. This tool can be used at the end of a Canvas module to give students the opportunity to connect course concepts and ideas to their own lives, in a semi-private format. Other tools such as SRES could be used as well.
The affordance here is that it works more like a personal journal: only the teacher and the student writing the journal entry can see what is being reflected upon. This can allow students to practice writing more in-depth and personalised reflective responses, safe in the knowledge that this writing will not be viewed by their peers. Students can then save and export their journal entries for later reflection, allowing them to build up a body of reflective work and chart the development of their reflective competencies over the semester.
The concept of ‘spaced repetition learning’ (Kang, 2016; Smith & Scarf, 2017) supports repeated encounters with learning material over time which produces superior long-term learning, compared with single encounters or repetitions that are massed together.
Such low stakes exercises can therefore shift student understanding from ‘single-loop learning’ (Argyris & Schön, 1992) – where reflection is understood instrumentally – to ‘double-loop learning’ (Greenwood, 1998), where students are encouraged to take a deeper analysis of their underlying assumptions regarding core concepts . In this case, the nature of how entrepreneurship is actualised.
Using EdTech effectively
There are, however, two key potential limitations that educators need to consider in applying EdTech tools to their own course design. First, students simply might not engage with them, and second, reflective learning could become confined to just these online activities, and not contribute to building student reflective competencies in general.
To address these limitations, it is important to build on any EdTech activities live and in-person, for example through simple conversations and elaborations during class, thereby effectively ‘reflecting on reflecting’. Utilising both mediums can help students link the relevance of the EdTech activities to the ‘bigger picture’ of their final assignments, and reflective learning in general.
Marrying online and in-person formats is supported by Fawns (2022a) who argues that there is no dichotomy between ‘technology’ and ‘pedagogy’ in that one does not drive the other. Instead, both are entangled, with technology shaping our educational approaches and experiences, and our educational approaches and experiences shaping how we understand and engage with technology (Fawns, 2022b).
Foregrounding this reconsidered online and in-person ‘pedagogical mix’ (Dron, 2022) can therefore allow for a productive and iterative approach to practising reflection and developing reflective competencies.
Want more ideas? Check out the CLAS design patterns on multi-modal assessment and reflection at scale.
Banner photo by Pixabay from Pexels
About the author
Paul Finn
Dr Paul Finn is a Lecturer with the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney. In his current role, Paul is co-developing the first cross-faculty Innovation and Entrepreneurship major which will span five other faculties in the university.