Reflective Thinking Skills

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Reflective Thinking Skills
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Outline

• What is Reflective Thinking?
• Reflective Thinking and Managerial Decision
  Making
• How to become a Reflective Thinker?
• Perspectives on Reflection
• Three stages of Intellectual development
• MIS 101 Reflective Thinking Dimensions
• Exercises

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What is Reflective Thinking?

• the process of creating and clarifying the
  meaning of experience (past or present) in terms
  of self (self in relation to self and self in
  relation to the world.)
• Boyd Fales . Reflective Learning Key to
  Learning from Experience. Journal of Humanistic
  Psychology, 1983
• Reflective thinking is a part of the critical
  thinking process referring specifically to the
  processes of analyzing, evaluating, and making
  judgments about what has happened.

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Reflective Thinking and Managerial Decision Making

• Individuals had never before thought about how
  they reflected. When asked, they were aware that
  they did reflect, but they had never considered
  it as something they could control or something
  they could use as a learning tool.
• Boyd Fales, Reflective Learning Key to
  Learning from Experience. Journal of Humanistic
  Psychology, 1983
• Enhancing decision making requires that we learn
  from our successes and failures and catalog
  mentally for future retrieval what has occurred
  and why.
• Dr. E. Byron Chew Dr. C. McInnis-Bowers
  Reflective Thinking Skills Developing and
  Accessing this Management Tool

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How to become a Reflective Thinker?

• Good reflective thinking is a process where an
  individual
• determines what information is needed for
  understanding the issue at hand
• accesses and gathers the available information
• gathers the opinions of reliable sources in
  related fields
• synthesizes the information and opinions
• considers the synthesis from all perspectives and
  frames of reference
• finally, creates some plausible temporary meaning
  that may be reconsidered and modified as one
  learns more relevant information and opinions
• Cynthia Mazow Learning, Design, and Technology
  Stamford University

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Perspectives on Reflection

• Metacognition
• Solving Problems in Uncertainty
• The Philosophical Mind

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Metacognition

• Questions surrounding an individual's ability to
  reflect is at the core of the historical roots of
  the concept of metacognition (Brown, 1987).
  Metacognition as an area of inquiry may be
  divided into three components
• Metacognitive knowledge- the awareness of one's
  knowledge and cognitive strategies
• Metacognitive judgements and monitoring
• Control and self-regulation of cognition
• Through reflection, one becomes aware of one's
  own knowledge or cognitive strategies and one
  cannot monitor or regulate one's own cognitive
  strategies, if one is not aware of what those
  strategies are.
• Researchers interested in the notion of
  metacognitive knowledge consider the object of
  reflection-the mind's "operations"-to be
  cognitive strategies for performing specific
  tasks. In such cases, the metacognitve individual
  must have clear, predetermined goals and
  standards in order to monitor and regulate her
  cognitive strategies effectively.

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Solving Problems in Uncertainty

• John Dewey and King and Kitchener-propose that
  individuals engage in reflection when they
  encounter problems with uncertain answers-when no
  authority figure has an answer, when they believe
  no one answer is correct, and when the solution
  cannot be derived by formal logic. The
  uncertainty or the belief in uncertainty is the
  essential requirement in this case for reflective
  thinking to occur. An individual must acknowledge
  that some problems may not be solved by one
  absolute truth.
• According to King and Kitchener Reflective
  thinking requires the continual evaluation of
  beliefs, assumptions, and hypotheses against
  existing data and against other plausible
  interpretations of the data. The resulting
  judgements are offered as reasonable integrations
  or syntheses of opposing points of view.
• King and Kitchener developed a Model of
  Reflective Judgement in which the reflective
  thinker examines and evaluates the available
  relevant information and opinions to construct a
  plausible solution to a problem. This plausible
  solution becomes the individual's belief that is
  subject to change as one gathers more
  information. The object of reflection in this
  situation-the "state of one's own mind"-is
  recognized as temporary and subject to change.

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The Philosophical Mind

• Richard Paul compares reflective thinking to the
  philosophical mind. In his view, the
  philosophical mind
• Routinely probes the foundations of its own
  thought, realizes that its thinking is defined by
  basic concepts, aims, assumptions, and values
• Gives serious consideration to alternative and
  competing concepts, aims, assumptions, and values
• Enters empathetically into thinking fundamentally
  different from its own, and does not confuse its
  thinking with reality
• Gains foundational self-command, and is
  comfortable when problems cross disciplines,
  domains, and frameworks
• Habitually probes the basic principles and
  concepts that lie behind standard methods, rules,
  and procedures
• Recognizes the need to refine and improve the
  systems, concepts, and methods it uses and does
  not simply conform to them
• Deeply values gaining command over its own
  fundamental modes of thinking

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Three stages of intellectual development

• Dualism. Very young or unsophisticated thinkers
  tend to see the world in polar terms black and
  white, good and bad, and so on. These students
  also have what Perry calls a cognitive
  egocentrismthat is, they find it difficult to
  entertain points of view other than the ones they
  themselves embrace. If they have no strong
  beliefs on a topic, they tend to ally themselves
  absolutely to whatever authority they find
  appealing. At this stage in their development,
  students believe that there is a right side,
  and they want to be on it. They believe that
  their arguments are undermined by the
  consideration of other points of view.
• Relativism. As students progress in their
  academic careers, they come to understand that
  there often is no single right answer to a
  problem, and that some questions have no answers.
  Students who enter the stage of relativism are
  beginning to contextualize knowledge and to
  understand the complexities of any intellectual
  position. However, the phase of relativism has
  some pitfallsamong them that students in this
  phase sometimes give themselves over to a kind of
  skepticism. For the young relativist, if there is
  no Truth, then every opinion is as good as
  another. At its worst, relativism leads students
  to believe that opinion is attached to nothing
  but the person who has it, and that evidence,
  logic, and clarity have little to do with an
  arguments value.
• Reflectivism. If students are properly led
  through the phase of relativism, they will
  eventually come to see that indeed, some opinions
  are better than others. They will begin to be
  interested in what makes one argument better than
  another. Is it well reasoned? Well supported?
  Balanced? Sufficiently complex? When students
  learn to evaluate the points of view of others,
  they will begin to evaluate their own. In the
  end, they will be able to commit themselves to a
  point of view that is objective, well reasoned,
  sophisticatedone that, in short, meets all the
  requirements of an academic argument.
• William Perrys Forms of Intellectual and Ethical
  Development in the College Years A Scheme (1970)

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MIS 101 Reflective Thinking Dimensions

• The most complete listing of reflective skills
  is found in Weast (1996) and were arragned and
  modified in a way to help us reflect
• Identify the reasons and the evidence
• Identify the author's conclusion
• Identify vague and ambiguous language
• Identify value assumptions and value conflicts
• Identify descriptive assumptions
• Evaluate statistical reasoning
• Evaluate sampling and measurements
• Identify omitted information
• Gathers available information of reliable sources
• Evaluate logical reasoning
• Synthesizes the information and opinions from all
  perspectives and fremes of reference
• Makes appropriate judgements
• Articulate one's own values in thoughtful,
  fair-minded way (objective, well balanced, and
  suffient complex)

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Exercise 1

• Describe a situation on-the-job when you were
  embarrassed, felt awkward, or were otherwise
  uncomfortable.
• How do you explain the situation? Your role? The
  role of others?
• What key insights did you learn that will assist
  you in the future?

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Exercise 2 (Based on the Reflections Guide in
Page 219a)

• Explain in your own words why an organization
  might choose to change its processes to fit the
  standard blueprint. What advantages does it
  accrue by doing so.
• Explain how competitive pressures among software
  vendors will cause the ERP solutions to become
  commodities. What does that mean for the software
  industry?
• If two businesses use exactly the same processes
  and exactly the same software, can they be
  different in any way at all? Explain why or why
  not.
• In theory, such standardization might be
  possible, but worldwide there are so many
  different models, cultures, people, values, and
  competitive pressures, can any two businesses
  even be exactly the same?

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Exercise 3

• Write 3 things you want your family and friends
  to remember you by.
• Write your own epitaph.
• Famous epitaphs
• I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am
  free.(translated) - (Nikos Kazantzakis)
• Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing bythat
  here, obedient to their law, we lie. Simonides's
  epigram at Thermopylae
• Why did I ask you these 2 questions?