Briefly describe the group with whom you led a discussion.

The audience was a group of about twenty faculty from a variety of disciplines (education, business, liberal arts, etc.) at a private university.

Briefly describe the program you led.

I led a brief (25 minute) discussion of Robert Frost's poem as part of a larger presentation to this group on the role of reflection in academic life.

How did it go?

I began by asking participants to think of a place they like to go to reflect and a place where they find it hard to be reflective--and then to turn to a neighbor and talk for a few minutes about one of these places. We next read the poem aloud and considered why the narrator chooses to kneel at a well curb. What is he looking for, and why there? We disagreed about whether he is trying to see deeper into himself or beyond himself. This led back, in time, to the question we had started with, as we considered afresh what we are trying to do when we reflect, or ask our students to reflect.

We also spent time on what it means to be “wrong to the light" when reflecting (What do we as teachers know about that?) and on the image of the water "rebuking" itself. (Rebuking itself for doing what?)

What, if anything, would you do differently?

Even in a brief time, and in a lecture hall setting, our consideration of this poem opened up very different ideas about the meaning of reflection inside the classroom and out. I would definitely use the poem again. If time allows, I might, as a colleague has suggested, pair it with Richard Wilbur's poem, "Digging for China."

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