Reflection and Learning: the Importance of a Listener

Knights, Susan. "Reflection and Learning: the Importance of the Listener." Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. eds. David Boud, Rosemary Keogh, and David Walker. London: Kogan Page, 1985. 85-90.

In this article, the author brings a technique from psychology called "co-counseling" into the classroom and positions it as a powerful form of reflection. Jackins (1978) discusses one technique of co-counseling called "free attention" where students break up into pairs and give each other their full attention for equal amounts of time, say three minutes each. The listener is not supposed to interrupt or question in any way--just give the person his or her full attention and listen as that person talks aloud for the full time. The author points out how rare it is for us to experience this situation of having someone's full, undivided attention without the possibility of interruption. In the classroom setting, the author notes, it is usually only the teacher that gets this free attention.

The author at one point in the article postulates that "very few people, however highly qualified academically, have confidence in their capacity to think" (88). Fear of being interrupted, questioned, countered or "knocked back," the author says, inhibits participation and "discourages private reflection" (88). The author believes that providing the space where one's thinking is getting listened to uninterrupted without being questioned or beaten down increases a person's confidence in his or her ability to think. Pointing to the work of Jerome Liss, the author highlights this point about the value of uninterrupted attention: "Uninterrupted attention is an essential human need and helps the working out of any problem" (89).

The author's own summary is so good that I will quote it in full:
"For the reasons discussed above, talking through one's ideas with the thoughtful attention of another person is a powerful way of clarifying confusion, identifying appropriate questions and reaching significant insights. Argument, evaluation and constructive feedback also have their place in the process of course, along with lectures, reading, group discussion and practical experience, but much of their value can be lost without the opportunity for all students to process the input in their own way, check it against previously acquired information and make it their own" (90).

Assessment
This article provides an interesting counterpoint to the argument that reflection should be done in writing, that the act if written articulation (Eisner) in language has an epistemic nature. It also confirms my own thinking about the usefulness of reflection being done in a social rather than individual context. Knight's method of free attention, though, is much more social. It also shares what we might call the magical thinking assumptions underlying both the written and here verbal power of reflection/articulation--just by expressing one's thinking leads to something valuable. That is the constructivist learning assumption too, right? Here the author made a big leap to assert that this form of thinking aloud in a context of free attention leads to "clarifying confusion, identifying appropriate questions and reaching significant insights" and helped them make learning "their own." These assertions seem to large to me, and would need to be validated through careful research (like grounded theory). We have another example, then, of a classroom practice leading a scholar to make sweeping assertions about the theory of reflection and learning based upon their own observations and theorizing, without being grounded in adequate research.

The author also has what we might call a loose definition of reflection. It combines a Rogerian-like "reflecting" (the author does bring in Carl Rogers at one point!) in the sense the "just listening with full attention" is a form of reflecting. The listener is a quiet and present mirror for the talker. But it also meshes in reflective thinking by saying that what the talker is doing as they ramble on and on for the full allotted time is a form of reflection; however, this labeling of simple articulation as reflection is pretty loose and unsystematic. It seems to me that the "talker-reflector" would need to be prompted and led to a greater degree toward reflective thinking in a Deweyian sense. It is an interesting technique, though, that I may try in my classroom.