by Dr. Megan Cuzzolino, Dr. Lydia Cao, and Dr. Tina Grotzer
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Why Focus on Reflection?
Most of us have been asked to engage in reflection in our workplaces at some point, but many of us struggle with knowing what to reflect on and how to do it effectively. Reflection can be a powerful asset in learning and performance. How can we improve our ability to engage in ways that leverage the power of reflection?
Research has shown that effective reflection exercises should have several key features as follows (Cuzzolino & Grotzer, 2022):
1) A reflection exercise should be truly “meta.” This means that it goes beyond simply describing what happened and takes it to the next level to delve into one’s thinking and emotions. It isn’t just thinking; instead, it is thinking about our thinking.
2) There should be dedicated time set aside for reflection during a break or at the conclusion of a learning experience (i.e., “reflection on action”) rather than trying to engage in a task and reflect on it simultaneously (i.e., “reflection in action”). It isn’t possible to do both well at the same time and when we try to do so, we end up in a form of rapid serial processing that distracts us from the thinking and the reflection process.
3) Effective reflection should be expansive, encompassing one’s thinking, emotions, actions, motivation, and environment.
Reflection with these three features—a meta level, dedicated time, and expansive framing—can be very effective. Then why are we suggesting a new approach to reflection and metacognition in the workplace? We believe that to be most effective, people need to: 1) take control of their learning and thinking processes, 2) understand the rationale for why those processes work, and 3) use the processes generatively in tasks that matter to them. These are part of a powerful new approach to learning that we are testing.
What is a Fast Fish Approach to Reflection and Why Might it be More Powerful?
The Next Level Lab is exploring an innovative way to engage in reflection opportunities, called the “fast fish” approach. Using a form of situated agency, the approach emphasizes managing and modifying one’s internal state and the external environment to support learning and performance, in addition to reflecting on one’s own thinking, feelings, and knowledge. Metaphorically, learners who are agentive in modifying their surroundings to enhance their performance are like fish that create vortices in the water to swim faster than fish anatomy alone would enable.
To illustrate the differences between traditional and fast fish approaches to reflection, let’s consider an example. Suppose you’ve been procrastinating on a presentation for a team meeting because you feel unsure about what information to include and how to structure it. A traditional reflection approach might prompt you to consider your thoughts and feelings in that situation and evaluate your past actions and processes in planning and making presentations, such as “What did I do?”, “What worked well about what I did?”, and “What did not work well about what I did?”. In contrast, the fast fish approach pushes your reflection to the next level by inviting you to expand your consideration beyond just how you could modify your past actions. It asks you to specifically consider the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of the environment you are situated in, how these aspects interact with your actions and processes, and very importantly, how you might modify your environment to support your best learning and performance in this new opportunity.
The fast fish reflection would invite you to: 1) look back at what happened, including actions you took to manage the situation, 2) consider how your actions and processes interacted with the cognitive, physical, emotional state and physical environment and its impact on the situation, and 3) look ahead to transfer your learning from this situation to the new presentation that you are planning. For instance, you could modify your internal cognitive state by chunking the task into manageable bits so that you feel less anxious preparing for the presentation and can focus better. When reflecting on your social environment, you might realize that it would be good to ask your supervisor to give you interim check-in points in advance. This would motivate you to get started early, providing more time and space for an iterative process. You might imagine the physical space and consider where you would feel most comfortable presenting from and how to arrange the audience chairs to help them see best. Reflecting back on your last presentation through the lens of situated agency should help you to better leverage what you learned in the past and plan your next presentation more effectively.
A Pilot Study to Test the Fast Fish Approach to Reflection
To better understand how the fast fish approach to reflection works in practice, the Next Level Lab conducted a pilot study in the summer of 2022. We were curious to find out: Do the types of metacognitive support (e.g., reflection prompts) matter? If so, in what ways? Are there differences in the reflection between learners with the traditional approach versus the fast fish approach?
To this end, we conducted a pilot study within an existing internship program in a large multi-city US consultancy firm that offers young adults from underrepresented or underprivileged backgrounds early career exposure for eight weeks, during which they are full-time employees.
The 26 interns who signed up for the study were randomly divided into two groups (i.e., 13 in the “traditional reflection group” and 13 in the “fast fish group”). Interns in each group were provided with a version of an online reflection, either the traditional or fast fish approach. Both versions were specific, modeled effective approaches to reflection, and provided the rationale for the value of the reflection exercise. Variations were in the reflection prompts and what they encouraged the intern to reflect on. Interns completed three reflections throughout the program, in the third, fifth, and seventh week, with 19 interns completing all three reflections. Three researchers conducted a thematic analysis of the interns’ reflections. They first independently identified emerging themes and then developed a codebook that was used to systematically code all the reflections.
Key Findings from the Study:
1) Interns used the reflection activity to enhance what they learned from their experiences in the internship.
We found that reflection provided learning opportunities for both groups. Interns across the two groups used the reflection as an opportunity to:
- identify their state of mind, such as feelings of nervousness, overwhelm, gratitude, and excitement;
- consider the social context and their relationship with colleagues, such as feeling welcomed and encouraged despite their initial apprehension and imposter syndrome;
- evaluate their prior actions and plan forward, such as considering what they did in a given instance and what they would do next time in a similar situation;
- consider the extent to which they feel a sense of agency in the internship or lack thereof; and
- identify instances of managing to modify their context, emotions, motivation, cognition, social context, physical context, and energy level in their body.
2) The type of metacognition mattered.
We found that interns in the fast fish group were more likely to:
- reflect on the specific ways in which they managed, modified, or failed to manage or modify contexts;
- identify how their current learning extrapolates to future work than those in the traditional group; and
- reflect on the value of receiving feedback.
These findings demonstrate that the nature of the metacognitive prompts can influence what interns notice and reflect upon. When the metacognitive prompts position them as agentive, fast fish learners, interns can exercise that agency to consider how to modify their environments to support their learning and performance. However, when they are not prompted to attend to these aspects, they often overlook them, which results in the loss of valuable learning opportunities about the past to take the learning forward. While it is important to acknowledge that the small sample size of this study and nature of self-report assessment limit the generalizability of the findings, the results of this study hold early promise for the fast fish approach.
3) A “light-touch” intervention can hold value.
The intervention created in this study was intentionally designed to be “light touch.” It introduced minimal additional tasks into the existing internship program. To keep the intervention as streamlined as possible, the reflection survey served as both the intervention and the means of data collection. This light touch approach was chosen due to limited time, space, and human bandwidth in the workplace context but highlights the value of small changes in impacting workplace performance and learning. The study was small in scale and faced a number of challenges that resulted in a small sample size and reliance on intern self-report. (Only a small number of the supervisors filled out performance reports, so this data was not included.) These limitations highlight the importance of light touch interventions that hold obvious impact and can be well-integrated into existing programs. At the same time, there is a need for a cultural shift in workforce development to prioritize employee learning and embed effective reflection practices into the workflow.
In Summary: The Promise of Fast Fish Reflection in the Workplace
The findings of this study suggest the promise of situated agency for leveraging the power of reflection in the workforce. The light touch approach produced discernible differences between the groups of interns and resulted in a greater number of fast fish moves for the interns in that condition. As we continue to develop and test light touch, fast fish approaches, we hope that workforce educators will seek out these interventions and findings here on our website and look for ways to integrate fast fish reflection into the flow of everyday work!
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge significant contributions from Next Level Lab colleagues Mingyue Sun and Jingyi Xu, the individuals at our research site who generously granted access and helped us execute the study, and the study participants.
This work is funded by Accenture Corporate Citizenship. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funder.