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What’s the issue with reflexivity?
 

Aspiring managers and leaders pursuing graduate education will face complex challenges without easy answers after they graduate. Reflexivity, more than simple reflection, is a critical thinking skill for navigating those challenges. Reflexivity is the ability to question one’s assumptions and what one takes for granted. Because reflexive learning is complex, scholars do not know much about how students learn this skill—or how the potential for reflexivity varies among students.

Because being able to question assumptions is an important skill for management and leadership programs to teach—and aspiring managers and leaders to learn—it would be helpful for educators to understand more about cultivating reflexivity in the classroom.

What does the research say about how we learn the skill of reflexivity?

Constructive Development Theory (CDT) is a theory of human development that charts how adults make sense of the world around them, using five distinct phases of cognitive development. Tim O’Brien, a lecturer in public policy at ����vlog����, conducted a study using CDT to assess how master’s degree students enrolled in a leadership class at a professional school experienced teaching methods that focused on cultivating reflexivity. For example, he studied how students at different developmental stages learned to examine their beliefs and understand their reactions—such as defensiveness—when questioned about their assumptions.

O’Brien found that students at earlier stages of development in the CDT framework—with less complex ways of understanding the world and their place in it—developed new skills for reflexivity compared to students who are more developmentally advanced, because those students were more likely to run into the limitations of their assumptions about how their world works. He writes that, “students at different stages of development experience the same teaching method for cultivating reflexivity quite differently. Results indicate that for students with limited reflexivity, there is profound developmental growth.” Other students who began the course with existing reflexive capacity did not confront the limitations of their assumptions but could more easily learn and apply skills that help them understand what they may be taking for granted. 

O’Brien reinforces the importance of teaching reflexivity as a foundational meta-cognitive skill and highlights the importance of differentiating approaches given the diversity of meaning making throughout classrooms. He concludes: “Reflexivity instructors would benefit from a community of practice that grounds itself in CDT, supporting students and challenging them appropriately and effectively.”