Reflections are a key component of the Senior Design Challenge, and encouraged continuously throughout the course. Reflections are core for students to recognize their progress and how their everyday work fits into the “bigger picture” they are working towards. Reflections are also a useful way for students to articulate their learnings and the skills they are developing.

We started the first term with a “team day” in which we brought two outdoors activities specialists, Brian Kunz and Lindsay Putnam, to work with students on team communication and collaboration exercises. Following each activity we had a debrief, for students to reflect, verbalize their learnings from these activities and make notes on “best practices” to implement in their own teams moving forward.

In general, each term students have two individual reflections: a midterm reflection due at the end of Week 5, and a final reflection due after their final presentations are submitted. These reflections are prompted by guiding questions specifically designed to make students reflect about how individual lessons fit the bigger picture of their project, as well as their lives.

In addition to this, we have students reflect as a team through team feedback sessions that also happen twice a term. In these sessions, team members have the opportunity to give each other thoughtful, well-constructed feedback about what they feel is working well and what they feel could be working better both in the context of their team as a whole and in reference to individual team members. Through this experience, students are able to reflect about their individual qualities, what they bring to a team, and how to better hone their team working skills for experiences beyond the scope of this classroom. In these sessions we also encourage students to translate their reflections into action by updating their team contracts and setting themselves new goals after their shared discussion.