USING REFLECTION AND CRITICAL REFLECTION TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE

Our model in Figure 22.1 integrates reflection and critical reflection. We also recognize that powerful emotions often arise as people learn from experience. We recommend that feeling and emotion be recognized and used to re-assess mental models and to get in touch with new interpretations of present and future events.

Simple reflection involves a review of attendant thoughts, feeling, and actions without questioning one’s interpretation or meaning of the experi­ence. But people can be misled by their interpretation of experience. They might frame the experience or solutions inaccurately, especially if they miss information or signals about the nature of the new challenge. Prior assump­tions and beliefs can lead to a partial, limited, or incorrect assessment of a situation. Simple reflection in our model is stimulated by questions such as the following:

• What did I intend?

• What actions, feeling, emotion, or results surprised me?

• How is this experience alike or different from my prior experiences?

• What does this experience tell me about worldviews other than my own?

Critically reflective questions do more. They probe the context, or the per­son’s assumptions, and the way this influences their judgments. Such questions look more like the following:

• What else is going on in the environment that I might not have consid­ered but that has an impact on the way I understand the situation?

• In what ways could I be wrong about my hunches?

• How are my own intentions, strategies, and actions contributing to out­comes I want to avoid?

• In what way might I be using inapplicable lessons from my past to frame problems or solutions, and is this framing accurate?

• Are there other ways to interpret the feelings I have in this situation? How can I better gain a pathway into experience of other people that might challenge or change my assumptions?

• What metaphors and stories capture my experience and differentiate it from those of others?

It is not easy to engage in critical reflection during a conflict, although it can be done with practice. Critical reflection demands an open mind and heart, the willingness to question one’s interpretations of the situation, a suspension of blame, as well as the ability to slow things down and probe for alternative view­points. Critical reflection is more easily carried out before or after the fact, in the cooler light of day and with time to learn new skills in order to change one’s customary response patterns.