Encouraging Reflection, Part 1: Reflective Practice6 min read
In this post (and the next), we will focus on how to use Collabra to Encourage Student Reflection.
This post is Part 3 in our Customer Success series. You can read all of the posts in the series by following the links listed below:
- Use Collabra to record each lesson (or important lesson highlights) for students.
- Ask students to listen back to the lesson at least once during the week.
- Teach students to use the Gibbs Reflective Cycle as a guide for evaluating lessons and practices.
- Ask students to record practices on Collabra and write their reflections as time-stamped comments at the exact point where each observation occurs.
The term Reflective Practice has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent times. But it is more than a buzzword. It is a vital skill that is key to developing proficient, autonomous learners and reducing the rate of attrition (i.e. students quitting before they become proficient musicians).
According to brightknowledge.org, reflective practice is “a way of studying your own experiences to improve the way you work.” In the field of music, reflective practice applies directly to the quality of our students’ practice sessions. While getting students to regularly spend time practicing is half the battle, ineffective practice is detrimental to their progress. We’ve all had this happen:
You assign a student a new piece, and, after a week of diligent practice, the student comes back to the lesson excited to play the piece for you. However, when the when you listen to the student play, you realize that the student read the music incorrectly and practiced wrong notes. Now, the student not only has to spend another week learning the piece correctly, he/she must unlearn the bad habits/wrong notes that were so diligently practiced the previous week.
By encouraging reflective practice in our students, we can teach them to pay more attention to the instructional material presented in the lesson and improve their ability to notice and correct their mistakes on their own. This, in turn, will improve the quality and efficiency of the time students spend practicing, thereby helping them to get better faster.
IMPEDIMENTS TO EFFECTIVE REFLECTION
When encouraging student reflection, it’s important to keep in mind these potential impediments to fully effective reflection.
- Material assigned to the student is not properly aligned with the student’s skill level.
- The student’s fundamental knowledge is incomplete.
- The primary method of learning is by rote, hindering the student’s reflective or self-guiding development.
Finally – when new music consistently comes to lesson inaccurately learned, the focus of the lessons should shift from content to learning the process of learning. Telling a student to go home and utilize reflective practice, even with an explanation, is insufficient. Most students will benefit immensely from a lesson or a series of lessons focusing on the learning process. An important part of this process is listening. While music is represented by a codification system on paper, it does not exist until is it played…and heard. A student must be trained to listen. To hear. Most students do not HEAR what they are playing – they are too busy trying to play it! Therefore, the recording process of Collabra can be extremely beneficial.
GIBBS’ REFLECTIVE CYCLE
Gibbs’ Reflective Cyle provides a framework for reflection. You can encourage reflective practice in your students by having them reflect on video footage of the weekly lesson and/or their practice sessions using this framework:
1. DESCRIPTION – What happened? What were your goals / intended outcomes? What steps did you take to reach them?
2. FEELINGS – What did you think and feel about it? How do you feel about your progress / the effectiveness of your efforts?
3. EVALUATION – List the specific areas requiring analysis such as pitch, dynamics, phrase beginning / ending, tone quality, etc.
4. ANALYSIS – What sense can you make of it? Overall, was the lesson / practice effective?
5. CONCLUSION – What else could you have done? What are 1 or 2 things you could have done to make your lesson / practice more effective?
6. ACTION PLAN – What will you do next time? Based on your reflection, what do you plan to do differently during your next lesson / practice?