One of the hardest things to do for students is to reflect – truly reflect – on their learning or on a topic. One of the hardest things to do for teachers is to teach students how to reflect.
The problem is that reflecting can be done in many different ways. People can reflect on topics, on strategies, on things they found interesting or things they found confusing. People can consider reasons something went well or badly and can explore changes to make for the future.
I tell my students that reflecting is looking back to move forward. It is a form of metacognitive thinking, which is a fancy way of saying “thinking about thinking.” When you reflect, you consider your learning (how you learned, why your strategies were effective or not) and what that means for future learning, or learning in a different subject. For example, perhaps you notice that you understand things better in class after having had a chance to discuss it with your group. How could you use that knowledge to improve your understanding in all of your subjects? What would you need to do?
Or maybe you find that when you have “group discussions,” you quickly get off track and think of random observations from your life or YouTube. What are some ways that you could keep yourself focused? Why do you think those strategies might work? How will you implement them?
When I’m looking at your reflections, I’m seeing a lot of lists of things that we have done in the past week / couple of weeks / month. We’ve talked about surface-level and deep-level questions; the same descriptors can be used for thinking. Surface-level thinking involves recalling/remembering, summarizing, identifying/defining, recognizing, listing and reporting, among others. If you are doing surface-level thinking, you are not reflecting.
Deep thinking involves analysing (breaking things down in order to understand them), evaluating (making value judgements and explaining them), applying (using ideas in new, actual situations), synthesizing (putting ideas together in new ways to make sense of them). Reflecting requires deep thinking, not surface-level thinking. Above all, reflecting involves answering the questions how, why, what now?
If you’re struggling to write thoughtful reflections, therefore, try using whichever of the question lists below applies to the learning or topic about which you’re interested in writing:
- How did you approach your learning? What strategies did you try, and how well did they work? Why do you think you got that result? What will you do differently next time?
- What was the most interesting / confusing / challenging aspect of your learning? Why? What will you do with that information / how will you overcome your confusion / how did you deal with the challenge? What’s your next step in your learning?
- How have you shown the core competencies (communication, creative and critical thinking, and/or personal and social awareness)? How did using them help you in your learning? Which do you think was most helpful, and why? How could you be more effective at using them next time?
- How have you grown as a learner? What can you do now that you couldn’t do before, and how did you move your learning forward. What are your greatest strengths and your biggest areas of growth? How can you use the former to help you with the latter? How will you continue working on your growth?
Some examples of strong grade eight reflections: