The power of Reflection

My personal journals about my personal feeling and reflections has really helped me grow and learn. By the simple act of deep reflection on paper, you can capitalize on your experiences of life and gain wisdom that can otherwise take long years to develop. I always hear Elder Bednar say that we can choose to be agents and act for ourselves or choose to be acted upon. It’s cool that we can choose to learn wisdom at a deeper level and at a younger age by choice.  I feel this field study experience is giving me a greater capacity to reflect and think. In my perspective I'm becoming more capable of learning from the world around me. 

Sometimes we let life just fly by without stopping to think about everything that's happening and how it's affecting us. When I sit down to write in my field journal every night I think back and every once in a while I realize things I hadn't noticed.  Maybe I come to understand better what a student told me about their how they wished teachers taught or why a teacher feels it ok that over half of his class is failing. I read a inquiry the other day about the benefits of teachers conducting inquiry projects or keeping teaching journals. I was impressed by this quote:

"Everyone is constantly telling stories or expressing interpretations of all their experiences. Teachers face entire rooms full students telling stories that may be very foreign to the teachers’ experiences.

Part of the challenge of qualitative inquiry and other education is to learn to read the stories others are telling, to understand them, to have compassion for them.  Qualitative inquiry is about helping educators invite the people they work with and sells to tell their stories more powerfully. It is all about helping educators find better ways to “here” or “read” those stories and share what they learn up through those readings with people they want to help."


This Field study is teaching me how to read and tell the stories of others. While we think and try to understand, we learn. I know for a fact that if someone else presented to me a write-up of the same inquiry project I would learn little form it. It has been my the means not the conclusion that I have been learning.