Learning, reflection and growth.

Byline: Faisal Bari

STUDENT assignments, even at the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, tell a relatively unhappy story about how students are (not) learning optimally from their readings and/or discussions within their classes.

There are those who outright plagiarise and hand in work that others have done. There are such students in all classes and/or universities, but I am not talking about these students here. These students have clearly opted out of the learning process, possibly in quest for just a degree/diploma, or for another reason, but I will ignore issues of how to engage this group if that is needed and leave that topic for another day.

When I read assignment papers, a substantial proportion of papers essentially consist of summaries of what students have read from the textbooks and/or papers they had been assigned. In the case of research papers, other than any empirical work they might have done themselves, most of the conceptual frame and analysis comes from other people's thinking and writing.

In two decades of teaching, one of the things I have found hardest in my interactions with students is how to get them to reflect on their learning and how they learn. This is not about speed reading, speed comprehension and so on, it is about how readings are internalised, how they are synthesised, how they shape their understanding, and how this all eventually reflects in their knowledge and worldview.

The first problem is, of course, that there are many students who do not read widely. Sometimes, they do not even read assigned text and/or papers. But, more than that, most of the students do not read around their assigned reading. They do not have a context for their assigned readings; they do not have access to relevant examples, and do not have access to connecting thoughts that could have come from extra readings. Students are usually made to enrol in a number of courses so that the reading loads they carry are significant. But whatever the reason, it results in a lack of sufficient reading in and around the area of interest.

Students' thinking remains in silos, and these silos tend to be quite narrow.

The course load also leads to scant time for reflection. Students need to think about what they read; they need to connect across readings, across topics and sometimes across subjects as well. But they never get the time to do that during semesters. And, even if they have free time, they might not - and most do not - know...

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