Category Archives: learning reflections

Reflecting on Reflecting

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?

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Community, connection and comprehension

The goal of pretty much any teacher is to encourage learning in her students, though teachers may disagree about what type of learning and how it should be encouraged in their students. Personally, I believe that no learning can occur without an environment of community and connection. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be best friends with everyone else, but I strongly believe that we can’t learn unless we feel safe, unless we feel like we can take risks and be wrong without someone judging or making fun of us.

This is why I spend so much time at the beginning of the year trying to build a sense of understanding and respect between us all – and I include myself in this. I am a part of the learning community of our classroom as much as my students. I was reading a book by Dr. Brene Brown called Daring Greatly, and she talks about how when people are at a distance, it’s easy to judge them or stereotype them, but when we come closer, when we get to know people, that prejudice falls away. Once we get to know people, once we try to understand them, we are much less likely to bully or hurt them. It’s not that we necessarily want to be great friends with them, but we can understand why they do the things we do and have more patience.

Most of the time, I feel like I do a pretty good job creating a sense of community in the classroom – helping students feel safe enough to take the risk of being wrong when they share ideas, opening up space where students will reach out to help each other rather than sit back and watch them struggle, making it possible for students to guide their own learning without a fear of failure, etc. Sometimes, though, something happens in the class that makes me wonder if the sense of community that I have been seeing actually wasn’t that. I wonder if the part of the class that I don’t see or hear includes the safety that I so want for my students.

Honestly, I don’t know that there is any way for me to find this out for certain. All I can do is ask my students: Do you feel safe enough in this classroom (with me? with your peers?) to be willing to take risks and try new things?

In short, is our environment a learning community, or a classroom?

Thinking about thinking

“We must surround our students with an intellectual life into which they might grow.” – Ron Ritchhart, Creating Cultures of Thinking

I just finished my most recent silent reading book – the one above – and one of the things I really noticed as I was reading it was that because the focus in silent reading is, of course, on reading, I was rarely having a chance to stop and reflect formally on what I was reading. It’s not that I didn’t think about it; of course I did. But some of the ideas, some of the challenges that Ritchhart issues to teachers in the book required written responses (at least for me, a person who processes ideas and thinks through writing), and because it was silent reading, I didn’t feel that I could stop and write about my thoughts.

One of the reasons I do silent reading with my class is because I believe we all can use a break in the day, and I want students to have choice and joy in reading what they want. However, I also plan silent reading into the day because I want to show my students that I am a reader. As the quote above states, I want them to see that reading is part of having an intellectual life. This is why I am really resistant to stopping to write more than brief notes in the text (I almost always read nonfiction books that allow me to develop my teaching and learning in a classroom setting): I want them to see me reading, and I feel like stopping to write might make them … I don’t know. Stop valuing reading? Think that I’m “getting away” with something that I won’t allow them? I’m not entirely sure what I think, to be honest.

But maybe taking the time to reflect while I’m reading isn’t such a bad thing. If I want to demonstrate my intellectual life, maybe I need to honour all aspects of it rather than isolate reading from other thinking activities. After all, reflection is a huge part of the “intellectual life” with which I want my students to engage. That quote is why I’m writing my reflection here, where my students can see and respond to it, instead of in my journal. It occurred to me in the process of reading the book that sharing my reflecting process with my students might help them develop their reflection skills as well.

Ultimately, I want my students to see me as a learner foremost, and a teacher secondarily. They have to share their learning process with me … I wonder if sharing my learning process with them would help build the safety and relationships within the classroom so that they feel more comfortable doing so.

Breakout EDU – Student Reflections

Have you ever played Exit Room games? You’re locked in a room, and you have to solve various puzzles and find clues to escape before the time is up. This can be a useful strategy in education as well, and Breakout EDU has capitalized on it by creating a version you can use in the classroom.

We have been playing these games at various points throughout the year, and I have found that they are useful both in terms of developing the Core Competencies of the BC curriculum and giving students a chance to engage with curricular content. My grade eights have the most experience with both of these types of games, having played several of them, and I’ve asked them to comment below so that teachers can read their feedback and thoughts around the games.

I’ve asked them to talk about the following areas:

  • their personal reactions to playing the games;
  • the usefulness of the games in developing the Core Competencies, such as communication, and critical and creative thinking;
  • the ways the games prompt a focus on learning and problem solving;
  • how they have developed personally in their skills at playing the games;
  • and anything else they think will help teachers make a decision about whether these games may be useful in their own classrooms.

To my students: thank you for providing your honest feedback!

Self-assessment

I’m going to be going to a workshop with other teachers on self-assessment, reflection and the Core Competencies tomorrow, and I was wondering if you would give me some feedback about our use of these things in our classroom (think the learning map and your portfolios; self-assessing your work; our Friday reflections; the Core Competency self-assessment you did with your block D teacher; etc.).

Thanks in advance for your help!

Reflect on the how, not just the what

One of my students today asked what she should reflect on, because she’d already reflected on the medieval inquiry last week, and that was the only “new” learning we’d done. (She phrased it differently, though.) I asked if it would help to read a learning reflection I wrote today, she shrugged, and so I wrote about something that’s been on my mind the last week.

Here’s the link from my teaching/learning blog.

The Power of “Yet”

This week has been mostly focused around our inquiry projects – which are in essence the “unit test” of our work with the Vikings and Franks. We’ve spent two-and-a-half months on this learning, with an entire week just on preparing our projects to share with an authentic audience.

On Wednesday, many students were unprepared. On Thursday, almost everyone had finished and presented their project. Some of them were amazing, most of them met the learning targets. So why am I having you redo them?

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What do you choose to put effort into?

One of the things I’ve really been struggling with as a teacher is how much support to give. I want all of you to succeed – but more than that, I want all of you to learn. I put a lot of myself (time, effort, passion) into the lessons that I create. I work really hard to try to ensure that everyone is challenged but not overwhelmed, that you are able to learn at your own pace but also held to high standards. I firmly believe that each and every one of you is exceptional. Not “sort of,” not “at certain things” … exceptional human beings. And I want to help you see that as well.

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Typical only equals boring when you make it so

Ms Rizzo spent a couple of weeks working with our students on how to write good poetry. From the beginning, they were told that their final project would be to write a poem about themselves. One student, however, recently described this assignment as “a bit typical.”

Yet a poet – or a writer, or an artist, student or not – must be able to turn the typical into something incredible. Invariably, teachers will assign you topics throughout your entire scholastic career – some of those will speak to you, some will not. No matter what the topic, however, your writing should be exceptional. You are learning the skills in this class to make it so.

Continue reading Typical only equals boring when you make it so

To blog or not to blog

In the end, it’s all about connection. Learning is being able to connect with ideas, with people, with new places and new situations, with yourself, with the world around us. Students learn better if their teacher can build a connection with them. We all learn better if we connect socially. Collectively, (connectively?) we are infinitely smarter than any one of us are individually.

Ultimately, that’s what blogging is for. Blogs allow you to connect with a community – sometimes small, sometimes encompassing people all over the world. They allow you to interact with your audience, and allow your audience to interact with you. They allow you to ask questions, to consider different viewpoints, to challenge your thinking.

Continue reading To blog or not to blog