August 2014 Workshop with Dr. Patti Clayton

Patti Clayton returned to UofL to conduct full-day workshop

Thanks to the faculty and staff who participated in making Dr. Clayton’s visit to the University of Louisville a success. Read about Dr. Clayton’s UofL workshop in this debrief posted on UofL Today. See below to access her recommended readings for the workshop.

During the full-day interactive workshop, faculty, instructors and professional staff members had the opportunity to enhance their approach to fostering their students’ deep learning, critical thinking, and ability to address community issues by employing the DEAL (Describe, Examine, Articulate Learning) model for critical reflection in assignments and assessments of learning.

As part of the process that generates, deepens and documents learning, critical reflection is key to all forms of experiential education, including community-based learning (CBL) and other forms of learning where metacognitive thinking is important. As learners are guided to think critically about their experiences, their self-awareness is heightened while insights/ideas are organized and consolidated in meaningful ways. Taking time to think through the dimensions of new experiences and information may be counter-normative to the way many of us teach and learn. Therefore, critical reflection can be both challenging and yet potentially transformative.

In this interactive workshop, participants focused on the concept and practice of critical reflection in experiential—and other formats—of learning. Participants were guided through the process of examining the research-grounded DEAL model of critical reflection and exploring how they can adopt that approach in assignments and/or assessments with students. Participants completed practice exercises in which they learned how to integrate critical reflection components into their course(s) and other instructional settings.

Recommended Reading

Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning [PDF]

Learning & Serving Together: An Introduction to Service-Learning as Democratic Engagement for all Partners [PDF]

Patti ClaytonPatti Clayton, Ph.D. has been working in the areas of service learning, engaged scholarship, and faculty development for over 15 years. Among her credentials, Patti is a board member of the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement and a co-editor of the Associations’ annual Conference Proceedings. She is also an associate editor of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, and she serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the Curriculum in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

See a select list of her research and publications here.

She has consulted for faculty development, student leadership development, student affairs support, and service-learning curriculum design. Additional resources: http://curricularengagement.com

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