What’s the DEAL? Program Level Examination of Reflection Design

The DEAL model of critical reflection (Ash & Clayton, 2009a) was explicitly designed to help improve the quality of learning and practice in applied learning. Heretofore, the DEAL model has been used at the level of the individual student or faculty member as learner. To improve understanding and implementation of critical reflection in a university’s international service-learning (ISL) program, researchers utilized the DEAL model of critical reflection to reflect on practice at the program level. Building on the comparison of multiple instances of ISL in Whitney and Clayton (2011), particularly the important variables of program design related to reflection indicated there, the researchers integrated these and other principles of promising practice into a user-friendly tool that can be applied to the design of reflection. Researchers then piloted its use by applying it to three (historical) cases of reflection design in ISL, analyzing archival data—specifically reflective practices from three program years in each decade of Kansas State University’s twenty-plus-year IST program. Service-learning programs rely on high quality critical reflection to help students make meaning of their experiences; service-learning programs must design reflection to support and advance that meaning-making, and therefore, must examine reflection design.