Reflection is a skill. It is also a practice and tool that has fallen out of practice. This is especially true for teens in the United States. Great, now I sound like Socrates!
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Our culture has become so focused on the immediate and instant that we often forget to stop and consider the now. This is painfully common and obvious when I ask a student “Why do you want to go to college?” However, this is not true for all teens.
Each year, I am blessed to work with students from the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in Johannesburg, South Africa. They represent five of the school’s best students – as selected by their one hundred classmates, who were selected from over ten thousand applicants from all corners of the African continent. They are, truly, much more extraordinary than one in a million.
When I teach the leadership classes for the Bezos Family Foundation, I am surrounded by twelve accomplished juniors and their teachers from the United States, who have – with these five students and one leadership educator from Africa – all been selected as Bezos Scholars. During the Aspen Ideas Festival, we gather and talk about the academic and philosophical tenets of personal and group leadership. One of the main tenets of those conversations is, reflection.
Reflection is also one of the primary tenets that drive the African Leadership Academy curriculum. Students at the Academy learn to reflect naturally because, honestly, they cannot escape the practice. The Academy is a 24/7 boarding school, and reflection is part of the very fabric of the school and its culture. Hearing a student from ALA answer an involved question is – for me – a step back in time when thoughtful consideration and the expectation to connect the past and future must have been the equivalent of our expectation for social media’s instant gratification today. They pause. They think. And only then, they provide an answer… with evidence and cogent examples to support their response. It is possible for all teens to reflect and provide thoughtful and long-view responses to complex questions, they just need to practice.
How do teens practice these behaviors of reflection? They just need to be asked the right questions – those which provide a personal connection and appropriate incentive to think. As the urban horticulture protagonist Allice Waters (Edible Schoolyard) suggests, experience in a garden can transform a child’s worldview about people, food and sustainability, and act as the “lens through which they see the world.” Or as the Gansta Gardener, Ron Finley suggests, “If kids grow kale, kids eat kale.” When students are asked questions that respect who they are and what is important to them, they will think. And when asked these types of questions consistently and respectfully, reflection and deeper thinking become habitual. After a while, they ask themselves these same questions. Kale becomes normal and understood.
Reflection is a practice and there is no right or wrong answer. It is exercise. A mental exercise. And questions that foster authentic reflection are much simpler than you might expect. Questions like:
- What do you think?
- Why is it important?
- How would you do it differently?
- Who might think differently than you do, and why?
- Will this be the same next year? In ten years? One hundred… Five hundred years?
The hard part – especially in a world that competes for our every waking, and possibly sleeping minute – is not asking these questions. The hardest part is listening authentically to the answers, responding thoughtfully and respectfully, and encouraging further reflection and growth.
When students have practiced and are comfortable with reflection and asking long-view questions it makes choosing a college and knowing why they are going – and how to approach the next four years of academics – so much easier, less stressful and more successful. As a college consultant, I can quickly identify how much reflection a student has done when I ask, “Why college?”