Lessons Learned Paper
Na’Kisha Sherrard, MS
University of Phoenix

Lessons Learned Paper Connecting with a group of doctoral students for the first residency is very frightening. Several students admitted to having feelings of misperception, worry, or uncertainty. Meeting someone new is certainly not comfortable, however the expectations and anxiety of a doctoral program is sufficient for someone to ask why one would choose to undertake a huge venture. This residency has motivated me to endure in my program. There were several eye-openers that revealed development and improvement as a doctoral student. In the last five days, various lessons and experiences were taught and learned but the most important
Reflection One of the most valuable topics I learned was reflection. Reflection is scholarly and emotional activities in which a person engages to discover their encounters in order to guide new perceptions and gratitude (Mezirow, 1990). I also learned the variations amongst critical reflection and reflection. The process of critical reflection covers three points: discovering suppositions that motivate views and behaviors, examining the precision and rationality in how we tie suppositions with our encounters of realism, recreating suppositions to make them more general and encompassing (Mezirow, 1990). During the different course activities we completed, I learned the value of reflection. This residency offered several chances for the students to reflect on what was learned. There were several practices used to promote reflection during this experience at residency. Our nightly journals were just one of the ways we could reflect on what was covered every day and focused on what we learned on each subject, how we can use what we acquired, what we learned about ourselves and how the class information and encounters have shaped our means of reflecting. This was not the only way of reflection we practiced during the residency. We encountered other types of reflection that inspired the practice of critical thinking. The residency essentially began with a