Teaching Reflective Skills in an Engineering Course

of the most effective tools for lifelong learning is the ability to reflect and learn from past experience. Reflection helps to clarify our understanding of the world and to create new distinctions and possibilities for the future. It is a way of creating intention. By putting our attention on the perception of what has happened and what we want to achieve, solutions to problems emerge more easily. We also believe reflective skills are among the main characteristics that distinguish excellent engineers from merely good ones. This makes these skills important to teach. This paper describes a set of reflective practices that we implemented in a 9-week course in software engineering at the junior undergraduate level. These techniques, many of them borrowed from professional leadership training programs, include individual, team, and project practices such as retrospectives (e.g., "What went well and what didn't?"), informal chats with guest experts (e.g., "Do they really do it that way in industry?"), workshop simulations (e.g., "How do we decide when to ship a product?"), journaling, and some unusual activities (e.g., "Draw a picture of your team"). To gauge student progress we also used weekly reflective assignments as well as reflective questions on the take-home final exam. All of these techniques were well received by the students, as evidenced by anonymous, detailed end-of-course evaluations, and by voluntary feedback students provided four months after the end of the course. The experience applying reflective practices appears to have influenced a number of the students into viewing their project, careers, social interactions, and life choices in a different, more positive light. Many have continued using several of these techniques after the course. We believe the practices worked particularly well because we set up the course with ample opportunities for students to make mistakes (a fodder for reflection) and learn from them in a non-threatening (academic) environment. While we recommend the approach to engineering educators interested in teaching "soft skills," we caution that to successfully apply it one needs to be comfortable identifying and handling conflict that may emerge.