From the draft posts I’m mining, I reread a fantastic 2008 post by Konrad Glogowski on his blog, Towards Reflective BlogTalk.
Remember blogs? Well, even if folks no longer blog per se, there is still a lot of writing we put out on the interwebs.
I was taken by his description of a reflective process he developed for his 8th grade students and their blogging. As I read it back in 2008, I immediately put his ideas into this stewpot of “5 minute reflective practices” I had had simmering in the back of my brain. I thought what Konrad wrote about could be used in teams and communities of practice, as well as in classrooms. With a few adjustments, it might be a very fine tool. This idea of “ripples” is very powerful.
Konrad wrote:
It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas.
You’ll need to go read the full post for the method. He links to his worksheet here.
All these years later, reflective practices remain useful and at the core of my process repertoire. Currently Keith McCandless and I are working on a draft of a new Liberating Structure (Strategic Knotworking) and we both feel strongly that evaluation should be woven into work from the start, not just at the end. I suggested that this is a form of reflective practice. I turn often these days to the work of the fine folks building the field of Developmental Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton and many others), and to the work of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner and their Value Creation Framework and subsequent book, Learning to Make a Difference.
Yes, it is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement…