Blogging is my platform for thinking and reflecting about my learning journey with my learners who make me a better teacher every day.
My #Onewordfor2017 is Reflecting, for us as educators and for our students. If we need to become self-directed learners and our students to be on the same path, we all need to reflect! As educators we know a lot, what is important is the doing of what we know and reflecting about the failures and the successes to make a difference in our learning.
Reflecting is a process, it is more than an event or a task with the students in the classroom. Our students are our teachers as we reflect on how to think, apply, collaborate, communicate, retry, persevere, change habits and create together. It is a process to allow students the time to reflect on the skills required to lead a path of recognizing their habits for learning. Bringing awareness of what is thinking? What skills are applied? It is a research-based process of students applications while unpacking their learning.
I have been fortunate in the past 6 years that I have taught students for 2 or 3 consecutive years allowing reflections on daily skills. Throughout the years students have become confident risk takers and leaders of their learning. Reflections were the indicators of their thinking process and assessment as and for learning to determine goals and strategies for learning. It is more than just reflecting on what has been learned, it is how the learning took place on conceptual and competency-based learning.
It involves observing behavioral actions in which they have become cues for learning to take actions. How students' actions impact their learning? The reflecting process is about encouraging students' insight on learning. It is a way for students to control their own learning and to foster their own growth.
Students' reflections are based on:
- Identifying their learning goals
- Co-creating or determining criteria of the process from content, concepts and skills required during learning tasks
- Experiencing that learning is more than just acquiring knowledge, it is behavioral actions developing their skills
- Being aware of their behavioral change during the process
- Becoming their own architects of how to develop their skills by reflecting on specific dimensions during tasks of the 6C's
- Be aware of their perceptions of unlearning to change habits for their learning
- To further inquire their learning in relation to real life experiences
- To explain about how they are acquiring/applying skills during learning tasks
- Reflecting on effective and ineffective strategies during learning
- Aware of interpersonal perspectives for learning
- Interdependence for learning during collaborative learning
- Developing character responsibilities
- Tension is learning- always working on inclusion
- The new learning acquired from others
- Their contribution to the learning process
- Reflecting on feedback from the teacher and colleagues about the learning process
During learning, it is the scaffolding of reflections that I make the students aware of. It is the signaling of the thinking based on which skills the students are applying during the learning. Giving the students opportunities to make meaning of their learning. The reflections could be applied at the start of the tasks, during and at the end. The intent is to compare and draw the causal of their learning outcomes, it is producing personal insights and learning from all of their experiences.
Through reflections and sharing their reflections, the students build their perspectives of their learning growth and accept the classwide peer pair learning approach in which students take turns as leaders and learners. The students become cooperative learners making meaning by sharing their reflections. Once students reflect about their skills developments, their ego falls away. They monitor their problem solving and build the habits of empathy, trust, perseverance and flexibility of working together when they share their reflections.
How valuable will students’ reflections be to impact their learning?
