Active Learning and Lasting Impacts: Reflective Writing in a Field-Based Geobotany Course for Teachers

The reflective writing exercise was initially designed to help participants synthesize content and foster improved communication with course instructors in a fast-paced, content-rich field course. However, it has proven to be quite useful in multiple ways. Through reflective writing, participants 1) become familiar with the idea and utility of being a "reflective practitioner" (they are asked to explicitly monitor their current level of mastery and understanding of the content and question what they still need to learn), 2) they learn to make meaningful field and laboratory observations, and 3) gain an understanding of how field-based science is conducted with the intent of doing field-based science with their students.

This activity also attends to participants attitudes in that reflective writing combined with instructor feedback tends to 1) help increase participants' self-confidence and competence as "amateur scientists," especially with field-based science, 2) generate enthusiasm for teaching multidisciplinary science at lower grade levels, and 3) foster an improved "comfort level" for teaching geology in non-geology high school science courses (geology is not offered in NM high schools, starting in 2006, all NM high school science teachers must teach some geology in their courses).

This is an upper-division, week-long, residential field course for K-12 in-service and pre-service teachers that has no prerequisites. The course integrates field and laboratory investigations with daily reflective writing.

Reflective writing is a difficult activity to implement. For participants, it is initially unfamiliar, quite time consuming, and many teachers find that sharing personal information with instructors makes them uncomfortable. For the instructors, reading each journal every night is very time consuming. Despite the difficulties, this exercise 1) provides instructors with very useful feedback that can be used to make mid-course corrections or address common misconceptions and 2) improves the teachers' self-confidence and competence in conducting field-based scientific investigations. Sample participant comments on the activity are provided.

The assignment handout (Acrobat (PDF) 66kB Apr27 07) completely describes the activity.

Anonymous teacher comments (Acrobat (PDF) 49kB Apr27 07) are provided as evidence of the success of the activity in this course.

• Pre- and post-tests of content knowledge
• Ongoing group and individual discussions in field and laboratory settings
• Daily formative assessment (field notes and reflective writing):
  1. read participants' field notes and make suggestions (e.g. field sketching) or corrections
  2. use their misconceptions in the following days' instruction
  3. assess answers to questions that attend to the learning environment and the affective domain.
• Journal evaluation: completeness and conscientiousness (see syllabus for details)
• Summative essay due two weeks after course completion: This 10-page paper focuses on how participants plan to use the content with their students and how those plans meet state science standards.

Moon, J.A., 1999, Reflection in Learning and Professional Development: Theory and Practice, RoutledgeFalmer, London and New York, 229 p.