Reflective questioning in management education : lessons from supervising thesis projects

Reflective questioning is a critical activity in management learning and education. This article describes research on the nature of reflective questioning in groups of management students working on final MSc projects. Drawing on content analysis of recorded meetings, we identify the following key dimensions of reflective questioning: provocation, need for cognition, epistemology, locus of cognition, logic, heuristics, level of abstraction, and cognitive complexity. The data suggest that individual reflection by students and collective reflection in group meetings are highly complementary in management education. In particular, individual reflection by students combined with meetings that support and provoke collective reflection may create substantial synergies between individual and collective learning. We also discuss the implications of these findings for management education.