The Reflective Student/ Entrepreneur/ Person - it is not about what went right or wrong

Every itself respecting university course on Design, Innovation or Entrepreneurship that is build on some kind of process and/or teamwork, requires students to write 'a reflection' at the end of the course. In processes and teamwork, things go right and wrong, so students better learn from that. The assignment is often formulated along these lines:

• Describe 1/2/3/n successes or failures that you encountered during this course
• Explain what went right or wrong in this situation
• Describe how you can use your learning in your next project (if success)/how you want to improve (if failure) (Here is where the SMART goals can come in as well)

The problem, however, is that we rarely teach students how to reflect in a useful way. It is the end of the course, students are done with the course, and now they are all of a sudden asked to write this reflection. Oh yeah, sure, the teacher told at the beginning of the course to keep track of your process, keep a diary even, but who has the time for that.. And the teacher never asked after it anyhow, so, at the end of the course, students reflect on the most obvious insights.

From my own experience, the three most addressed 'insights' are:

• We took a long time to realize what the project was actually about
• We should have made a better planning
• We should have communicated better with each other

And the ways to improve are:

• We will better and earlier define the scope of the project
• We will make a better planning
• We will communicate better with each other

I describe this in the context of education, since I am working as an teacher, but I am sure that every reader, from academia, private sector, public sector, self employed, recognizes the context of 'the reflective exercise' and these insights. And I am also sure you still experience the same 'insights' in every, project, that, you, are, part, of.

So, I would argue that it is useless to ask students to reflect on successes or failures. Students will drastically oversimplify the success or failure and propose the most generic improvements. Listen to any politician or manager and they will say exactly the same on how they are going to do better in the next project. Why do we still ask students to reflect on their successes and failures? 'Because that is how students learn.' And that is where I believe the misconception is.

We do not learn so much from success or failure, but we learn from normal, every day life experiences.

That is why last semester, I taught a course for the first time, that focused completely on what happened in normal, every day life.

The course: Entrepreneurial Life Skills

The course was for students of the MSc program Technology Entrepreneurship, a program where students study and develop their technology startup simultaneously. The starting point was that these students have three different lives: a student life (all the courses that they are taking), an entrepreneurial life (their start-up activities, contact with customers, clients, investors, etc) and a private life (relations with boyfriend, girlfriend, son, daughter, father, mother, friends etc). These lives all come with their own characteristics. In the course, I explore with the students how these lives influence each other (for better and worse) and what happens in these processes.

In order to 'reflect' on these processes, students write auto ethnographic texts.

I am well aware of the large body of literature on 'reflective writing', but as stated above, I think 'reflection' leans too much on the ideas of improvement and learning from mistakes, which is not always directly useful for students. I will explain why I see auto ethnography as more fitting.

Auto ethnography derives, quite obviously, from ethnography. And ethnography in its purest form takes place in the frame of anthropological research. The anthropologist visits people in their culture (in the traditional example, an unexplored island somewhere in the Pacific) and just describes what happens in the social and cultural processes. I find this describing very important and in a sense refreshing, because it delays judgement. The anthropologist simply notes and will only later (maybe never) make sense of what happened in that particular situation.

The main difference between ethnography and auto ethnography is that instead of studying other people in a culture, the auto ethnographist studies oneself in a culture. You are your own study object. And this is what I asked the students; describe what happens in your every day life in your three different lives.

The obvious question and difficulty here is: where to start to describe and what to focus on in producing these descriptions?

John van Maanen's book Tales of the Field is helpful here. In his book, he differentiates between three different kind of tales (in reality, you will find that texts have elements of all three tales, but for the sake of clarify, lets separate them):

Realistic Tales: The writer provides an as precise as possible account of what happened, going into all the small little details that would normally be left out when one tells this story to someone else. The real experience is in the details, and it is impossible to know what is interesting before you explore all details. For example: 'Today I worked with Rick and Samantha on our project. The room we worked in looked like (long description). I started by explaining to Rick that (long description, followed by long descriptions of what others said). Overall I felt (long description of feels and emotions during this situation).'

Confessional Tales: The writer explains how, for example, ones personal biases, character flaws or bad habits influence the process that the writer was part of. Note here, that there is no judgement towards oneself; it is not saying 'I like Adam better than Brenda so I should find a way to work well with both of them'. Instead it is 'I like Adam better than Brenda, that is why I interact with Adam in this way (long explanation here) and with Brenda in this way (long explanation here). The key here is to explore why you as person interact the way you do in certain situations, and why you interact differently in other situations.

Impressionist Tales: The writer explores why a certain situation was memorable; made a big impression on the writer. The main difference with the confessional tale is that the focus is on something special that happened in the social context and not because of the writer's personality. For example 'For the first time, George really gave a great presentation today that inspired me. I am not sure what it was about, perhaps his outfit? The slides seemed to be the same as always.. Perhaps he talked slower? Yes, I think he talked slower (unpacks this thought more) and therefore I listened more to what he was saying'. The key is to explore 'these moments' that you later would look back on a life changing, but already recognize the moment while you are experiencing them.

I asked students in the first weeks of the course to write different texts using different approaches of writing. I made it very clear that the purpose is not to find their perfect topic right away, or to describe something that should be improved. Instead, students explore what it actually is that they are doing in their different lives and what they would find potentially interesting to write more about.

Through writing and rewriting students start to get better grip on what they find interesting. Some students are fascinated by team dynamics, others by personality, again others by organizational structures or what passions means in their lives. I encourage students with similar interests to exchange texts and see how they can further unpack their interest. Once students talk with other students, they often think of another situation that occurred that might shine a different and new light on the topic and thus another text is written.

(There is the issue here on how to work with trust and anonymity, since students might appear in each other's writing, which becomes clear when they read each other's work. Students find this uncomfortable in the beginning. The main response from my side is that everyone should realize that the texts are subjective, it is purely the view of the writer. Others are very welcome to write a text about the same situation that presents how they, from their perspective, experienced the situation. The key here is to write it up, and give it some thought, and not just spontanously respond and shout that the other is wrong and their perspective is right. Students normally accept this. And if it is really needed, texts can be anonymized before they are shared with others. There are many approaches and discussions here, which probably would deserve an article on its own.)

In the final weeks of the course (throughout the course I also introduce a whole range of topics on design and innovation, processes, management and emotions that we do exercises with and that can inspire students' writing), I ask students to pick 1, 2 or 3 of their own texts that they find most interesting. They then find literature that helps to explain what is described in these texts. The aim is not to do an extensive literature search till all the literature on a topic is found. Instead, the students should find 'a piece of literature' that explains their text well enough.

The main insight here is that the a single piece of literature (or tool, or model) will almost never fully explain what happens in the situation as experienced by the student. The key learning here is to create the awareness that theories and models are always simplified. The auto ethnographic texts of the students contain little nuances and details that can never be captured by a generic model. The student will then describe how the experience as described in the auto ethnographic texts differ from the model. For example: 'The Belbin Test describes 9 distinct team roles. However, in my group work as described in the text, I experienced that in the morning I took up these two roles while five minutes later I took up three different roles, and again 10 minutes later I took up a role that does not fit in one of the 9 Belbin roles. Therefore, I find the Belbin Test useful to explain (long description) but not useful to explain (long description).

The collection of auto ethnographic texts, the literature, and the analysis of how (well) the literature explains what was described in the auto ethnographic texts, form the only hand-in of the course. This hand-in is not a quick, sharp and concrete action plan on how to become a better entrepreneur, where the reflections and future actions are very similar between students. Instead, it is a deep and descriptive story of what goes in the life of a particular student, providing deep insights and possible directions that this particular student could explore in his/her student, entrepreneurial and private life.

Final thoughts on Education

The process described above has been extremely useful for students to make sense of their practice. And I hope it became clear that I understand 'making sense of ones practice' as fundamentally different from 'learning from ones mistakes and successes'. Auto ethnography is an accessible vehicle for students to go deeper into what they experience in their project and group work.

A requirement here is to have a dedicated course focused on auto ethnographic writing, where the only deliverable is the writing itself. In most courses the main deliverable is 'the project' with the strong focus on how the activities of the students justify the outcome of this project. Just adding an reflective or auto ethnographic exercise will always result in superficial insights, the project comes first. Instead, you want to teach students early on in their studies to be curious about and observant of their own experiences and give them the space to do so in a dedicated course. Then their learning for the rest of their (student) lives will be build on curiosity and self observation.

What if I am not an educator?

You might have just read this text and wondered how all of this is relevant for you, since you are not an educator but rather an entrepreneur or manager in a small/midsize/large organization. I would argue that the exact same logic applies to you and your employees; they do not necessarily learn from their successes or failures in their jobs, but rather learn from what goes in their every day working life. Also in working life, almost all reflection on performance is done on the employees' successes and failures, and there is hardly any room to look at the experience of every day life.

Setting up routines where employees have ways to observe their own practice and simply describe what goes on in this process to figure out what they find interesting is extremely insightful for both employees and managers. However, this requires that you as a manager actually provides the time and space for this, since it is conflicting with the highly paced pressure of everyday performance. Targets and KPIs are still most pressing and important in every organization, and who has time to observe and describe ones own practice.

So, the same logic applies, but how to practically implement it in organizations is worthy of another article, and for another day.

This is a rather non-academic text on educational development, where, other than the van Maanen Tales of the Field reference, I excluded all references for the sake or readability. If you have any theoretical considerations, please send me a message. Also all other comments, critiques, similar/different practical experiences, clarifying question and so on are very welcome!