Teachers, you are the Facilitators of Making Meaning! Having students reflect on their learning is a very important part of making meaning out of student learning. By having students reflect on their learning through high-level questions, you will engage their minds to transform their understanding of the content they have learned. Reflection through higher level questions allows the students to: process the information learned, enhance meaning through building connections, and encourages insight on how they learn best. Through these practices, is how we ensure an enduring understanding of the content learned by our students.
The timing of a learners reflection is very important. ASFM recommends that at the conclusion of each unit of study, the teacher provides the students with a set of higher level questions to encourage a student comprehension of the topics learned. This reflection should be performed after the unit, but before the assessment. This provides students the opportunity to self-assess their understanding and determine where they need to focus their studying for the final assessments. Here are some example question for the initial reflection, post unit and pre-assessment, that can be adapted to your own content:
- Describe your level of understanding and ability to apply the content from this unit?
- What areas of study from this unit require more practice or additional information for better understanding?
- What insights about your learning style have you gained that you will help you in the future
- What strategies did you employ to monitor your progress toward your desired outcomes?
- How does this content connect to other content you have learned?
- As you think about your future, how might this information be used in your life?
After they take the assessment and receive feedback on their performance, students should add their assessment artifacts to the reflection they had already made for that unit. They will also add a new bit of reflection taking into consideration the teacher feedback, performance on the assessment, and how this compares to their original reflection on their content knowledge. Students should use this process to draw conclusions on how they can improve their performance in future units. They should provide hypotheses about study habits, classroom participation, etc. based on what they have learned about themselves and their learning through the reflection process.
For students to understand how to reflect well, these skills must be taught and modeled. As with anything in the classroom, if you have not taught it to the student then you cannot assume they understand how to do it well. When first getting students started with reflecting, it can be very beneficial to initiate a unit with students self-assessing their understanding of the content to come. Providing students a Google Spreadsheet (example) through Doctopus that lists the benchmarks the unit will target and five columns for them to mark (never heard of it, sounds familiar, I know a little bit about this, I understand this, or I could teach this to others) their current understanding of the content can help students prepare for what they are about to learn. At the conclusion of the unit, students can self-assess once again using the same spreadsheet. This tool will provide students with a blueprint of their learning: what they were supposed to have learned, where their knowledge has grown, and where they are still struggling. They can then use this information to refer back to as they answer the reflective questions about their learning during the unit. This spreadsheet also helps the teacher see at a quick glance what students already know through their self pre-assessment and what students feel they have learned post unit instruction, but prior to giving the assessment. This provides the teacher an opportunity to differentiate instruction throughout the unit or even modify the unit plans to better support students’ learning needs. It also allows the teacher to identify any areas where students show the need for reteaching prior to the assessment.
These reflections are an important part of the students’ learning portfolio where they demonstrate their personal growth as a learner. ASFM will continue to use blogs to host student learning portfolios. Each student at ASFM has their own blog site. Their address is http://www.asfmtech.org/ plus their ASFM student username, which is their graduation year, last name, and student ID number (ex. 13sweeney1234). If you have any students struggling with their blog access or setup, you should ask them to follow this set of tutorials. We ask that after each unit, teachers have students create a reflective blog post. Students will use categories and tags to organize their blog posts appropriately. The initial reflective post will not go directly into the student portfolio category. At the end of the semester in preparation for the student’s final exam, teachers will ask students to reflect on their learning from the semester by going through their unit reflections posts to select certain posts to add to their portfolio category. Because students have been asked by the teacher to use the proper tagging system that identifies a blog post as a unit reflection, students will be able to easily find the posts they need to review. The tagging system uses the department letters for identification (LA – language arts, CO – computers, FA – fine arts, MA – math, PHE – Physical Ed, SC – Science, & SO – Socials) plus the letter U, which stands for unit, and the number that represents the grade level of the course. An example tag for a reflective post for done after a grade 6 science unit would be, SCU6. This post would have also been categorized into the Science category. Only when the student decides it should be included in the portfolio do they add the category Portfolio to the post as well.
To easily organize and access student blogs, teachers can create a Google Form that requests key information: student name, class period, and blog link. This will provide the teacher with a list of student blog links in one easy to access spreadsheet. The other option is to use an RSS reader. The teacher would subscribe to the category they teach on each of the student’s blogs. Each time the student posted something new in that category, the teacher would be able to see it in the RSS Feed. To get started using RSS feeds and organizing your students’ blog content, watch this video tutorial.
Finally, it is important to remember that though we give students feedback on their reflective style and effort, we do not grade reflections. Reflections can be considered for disposition points, but a students expression of their understanding is not something that we can assess. It is only something that we can guide them to do better through additional examples, modeling, and feedback. We want students to feel empowered, to be honest with themselves about their learning and not fear judgment on their self-proclaimed strengths and weaknesses. With that said, it does not mean that the teacher is excused from reviewing student reflections. On the contrary, teachers should provide important anecdotal feedback that pushes the student to improve the quality of their reflection style and effort, so that students understand how important it is for their learning process.
