While this year is certainly unlike any other, it has provided me with the opportunities to grow in education and spend time reflecting upon what is working and what is not. This year, and through virtual learning, I have learned more about necessary components to build classroom culture, student engagement, and student discourse. I have seen the desire to include social emotional learning skills in the classroom increase drastically, as it should. A reoccurring message I kept hearing and reading is taking time to reflect as a learner and a leader in order to grow. As John Dewey stated “We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.” As an educator I need to model reflection for students so they too can learn from reflection and deepen their understandings.
I first developed some student engagement/reflection forms after attending a Solution Tree session from Cassandra Erkens on Assessments. She mentioned to elicit student feedback on best practices and share those responses with the students about what is working well and what is not working for them. She also stated “you can’t judge engagement by observed behavior”, so asking students to reflect on their engagement allows the teacher to better understand their students learning.
Below are two examples of students engagement/reflection forms , one in google forms and the other in google slides that were developed after Cassandra Erkens session:
Another option for building student reflection would be to pose three questions: what’s working, what’s not and what’s next for students to complete. It would be beneficial to have a teacher model responses or provide sentence stems in order to have students really take the time to reflect. The what’s next box can be difficult for students to complete if they do not have a vision of where to go next or a goal they would like to achieve in their learning. This can be used as students reflect upon a daily learning target or as far as the end of a grading period.
A 3-2-1 Summary is designed for students to reflect upon their learning from a daily learning target. At the end of class ask students to write down 3 things they learned today, 2 things they are not sure about, and 1 question they have. This provides feedback to the teacher about student learning as well as what questions remain in the class. Students could use their learning target and success criteria as a focus to answer the 3-2-1 summary or you could adjust the summary to focus on engagement.
Sentence Stem Reflections: below are three examples of sentence stem prompts you can provide students to reflect upon their engagement or learning from the class period. Students can answer these in a digital setting as well as on paper. This provides a moment of reflection for students besides asking them to answer one more math problem to prove their learning.
· Today my engagement was…
· What I liked about class today was….
· Today I felt stumped about ….
In reading “The Distance Learning Playbook” by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, I came across the quote “ Formative evaluation shouldn’t be done only so the teacher can make decisions(that’s important) but also so the student can make decisions.”(161) Using reflections not only provides the opportunities for teachers to gather feedback from students and focus on best practices for their class but also allows students to make decisions about their learning. Reflection allows learners to link both cognitive and emotional information and apply their learning to future situations. “As students reflect on their learning, they gain important assessment information about how they perceive the efficacy of their thinking.” ( Learning Through Reflection, Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick
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