It’s a lost opportunity that students aren’t given more outlets to reflect at all levels of education.
Chris Eck | Oklahoma State University
USE CASE
Providing purposeful reflection
Chris Eck
Assistant Professor of Agricultural Education
School/District:
Oklahoma State University
Grade: Higher Education
“Whether we’re talking about K-12 or higher education, allowing students an opportunity to reflect is important and I feel like we don’t offer enough opportunities for that, especially in our university classes, because of their high-paced nature. It’s a lost opportunity that students aren’t given more outlets to reflect at all levels of education.”
Chris Eck oversees both graduate and undergraduate students who are on a path to teaching and recently, he has incorporated MirrorTalk into his graduate students’ curriculum. Reflection is a tenet the students are all familiar with, yet infrequently have the time and space to practice it organically within the confines of their demanding coursework.
To remedy that, as part of their professional development in his weekly three hour class, Chris created a reflection station using MirrorTalk on Swivl’s M2 hardware. MirrorTalk’s AI prompt generator enables Chris to customize reflection opportunities for his students to glean new insights into their thought processes every week.
Chris is advancing his personal goal to provide numerous opportunities for structured reflection for his five graduate students and—based on their early success—plans to scale it to his 25 undergraduate students using M2’s Workspace. Workspace enables small group reflection and guided activities through teacher-driven automated workflows.
Responses to the data dashboard
With M2 and MirrorTalk, Chris and his students now each have learning experiences tailored to their needs. Chris gave each of his graduate students a comprehensive overview of M2—including how they can leverage it as a classroom tool beyond reflections. “Each of my graduate students has a goal to become university faculty members. The first time they reflected with MirrorTalk, I walked them through the dashboard and demonstrated how we could incorporate reflective data to drive our discussions. I wanted to expand their thinking by understanding the tool’s potential.”
Chris’s two-fold approach provides structured context for reviewing reflection data. First, he socializes the benefits of reflecting with MirrorTalk by providing a full overview of the dashboard, reviewing everyone’s reflection data together as a group. Second, he and his students synthesize the reflection data together, identifying patterns and themes. “We look at the data on the dashboard as a class to find themes of common struggles and use them as the starting point for our discussions. Or, conversely, we look at the data dashboard to find really great ideas, which create a new line of discussion that benefits everybody.” Chris has seamlessly integrated MirrorTalk into his teaching, providing his students with an outlet for self-reflection and insights into their peers’ thought processes.
In their journey toward becoming educators themselves, these students find themselves at a pivotal stage for habit formation. Empowering them with structured reflection whilst keeping pace with their coursework, not only prepares them for the challenges of the modern classroom but also unlocks the benefits of reflection, for themselves and their future students. MirrorTalk is a foundation to build strategic integration of reflective practices that not only enhances their own learning journeys but fosters growth mindsets and helps them become lifelong learners.
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