Interrupt the ‘Forced March’
Giving students time to think will better prepare them for challenges they will face as engineers.
By Debbie Chachra
What do your students do after they finish a project or turn in an exam? If they’re like most engineering students, the answer is “Breathe a quick sigh of relief and move on to the next thing.” Especially in engineering education, where the emphasis is often on how much content can be crammed into a course, students rarely get the opportunity to reflect on their learning. As my colleague Mark Somerville puts it, “Engineering education can be like a forced march up a mountain, and when you get to the top, you aren’t even allowed to stop and take in the view.”
But reflection isn’t just about stopping and smelling the roses. It’s a fundamental part of learning.
In the experiential learning model developed by David Kolb, an organizational behavior specialist, our experiences of learning are a combination of perception (thinking and feeling) and processing (doing and watching). The learning cycle consists of four waypoints: concrete experience (feeling), reflective observation (watching), abstract conceptualization (thinking), active experimentation (doing), and then back to concrete experience and continuing around. We’re used to thinking of reflective observation as a starting point – “watch me as I do this”– but Kolb argues that it’s part of a cycle; that reflection is just as important after the “doing” phase as it is at the start. Being conscious of allowing time and space for reflection can therefore help learners absorb and retain material.
But there is a deeper reason to foster reflection in our students, one outlined in Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner. In it, Schön argues that education in the professions, including engineering, focuses on what he calls Technical Rationality, “instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory or technique.” But when we observe skilled practitioners of engineering and design, we see them using an enormous amount of tacit knowledge that they can’t necessarily articulate, which Schön calls knowing-in-action. When these practictioners come across a situation that involves “uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict,” they draw upon reflection-in-action – thinking about what they are doing, both tacitly and explicitly. As we move away from the idea of engineers as just focusing on the technical components of their work and towards a model of engineering as deeply engaged with people, the ability to reflect on one’s work and learning will be even more crucial.
So how do we develop this in our students? Reflection has long been part of both the design process and design education. In the first-year engineering design course at Olin College, students build an experimental prototype, and then film a video reflection of what works well, what needs to be improved, and how they intend to redesign it for their final prototype. But reflection also can be incorporated into other types of engineering courses. At the end of a project, students can write “insight cards” — two or three rules of thumb that they would tell themselves if they could go back in time to the beginning of the experience. Students also can create “mind maps” of important concepts and ideas in a course, and how they relate to each other. It’s especially useful to do this at the midpoint of a course and then revisit the mind maps again at the end, so students see how their understanding has changed.
Building opportunities for reflection into our courses will help our students learn but, more importantly, it will help them mature into thoughtful, reflective practitioners, capable of dealing with the broad array of technical and nontechnical factors they will inevitably face.
Debbie Chachra is an associate professor of materials science at Olin College. She thanks Olin’s associate dean for faculty affairs and development, Mark Somerville, for conversations leading to this piece.