Note: the above example is from a teacher doing an audio reflection on their work.
To offer more metacognition opportunities, you can add an audio reflection to your repertoire. Instead of writing a post when you want to pause and consider your learning, you can record your own voice in response to assigned prompts and submit the audio reflection as a critical reflection.
As you become accustomed to capturing your verbal reflections about your learning, you’ll access benefits of metacognition you might miss in a writing-only reflection.
Benefits of audio reflection:
Reflection can be more manageable for more learners – For anyone who is insecure about their writing abilities, audio reflection relieves the anxiety of spelling errors and misplaced commas. Pauses, missteps, and rewordings don’t risk the revision and editing that might accompany a written submission. Although writing may force some of you to slow down enough to think more fully, voice recordings can help others gather enough speed to complete full reflections that may seem too daunting or time-consuming to write. A student might offer three comparisons in an audio recording compared to the one they can muster in writing. Quick and accessible, routine audio reflection can help you to establish and reinforce metacognitive processing.
New language is less intimidating – Students naturally revise and self-correct as they speak. They can layer synonyms around more challenging vocabulary to make sure they are understood. For example, a student struggling to discuss logical evidence might call her work factual, supported, and reasonable or point out how she provided multiple examples to prove her point. Other students may come close to properly pronouncing new terms they’re learning even if they’re not sure about how to spell them. Although novice learners aren’t going to speak in the straight-forward prose we usually value, students are building vocabulary and wrestling with understanding as they experiment with new terms.
Students construct more nuanced accounts of learning – Written and audio reflection assignments can share similar goals, be similarly structured, and can even ask students to respond to the same prompts. Yet, for some students, the shift away from writing can help them elicit new insight they may not be able to express on the page. Since audio reflections feature students in their own voices, personalities come across more easily, especially those of students whose writing is stilted and laden with errors. The result is often a livelier and more detailed representation of cognitive processing.