Dear Diary: Scaffolding Reflection

Sometimes, when you're so close to a problem for a long time, the only solution is to talk it though with a colleague who knows what the constraints are so that you can escape the echo chamber inside your head. That's exactly what happened yesterday when I talked though how to scaffold reflection on Friendfeed for our first year students in the coming term with Jo.

This term I want to move on from the staff-led reflection (topic suggestion) which worked last term to a more student-led structure where people decide what they want to write about for themselves. And yet, our previous experience says that scaffolding is of critical importance for most students to be able to achieve significant authentic reflection, and that a chronological structure is the most important and effective element of guidance we can give (without telling them what to write).

In a flash fit spurt of inspiration, we came up with Dear Diary, and associated light-touch assessment. Will this be an effective tool to scaffold self-initiated reflection on a social network? We'll see, but we can already guess that only a minority of these students will be able to come to grips with deep professional reflection as a regular part of their academic practice. This is a numbers game, maximizing the return in the ZPD.