Why Reflect? | Mrs. Peery's Technology Blog

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/aneye4wonder/ used under a Creative Commons license.

Mark Clements, in his blog post titled “The Importance of Reflection in Education” states that most students do not understand that initial failure is part of the learning process, and that is why reflection is so important for them. He makes the point that teaching students how to reflect on their learning is time consuming, but without it there is no real “learning” taking place. Unfortunately, in the educational culture we are currently in where presenting an increasing amount of content is required, teachers feel pressured to cover the material. There just does not seem to be enough time to allow students to reflect. I am not a typical classroom teacher. I see each student for 45 to 75 minutes once a week. I am not under the pressure they are under to get the core subjects mastered, and yet I feel the temptation to skip the opportunity for reflection because of the time it requires. We were all encouraged this year to build in that time for reflection for ourselves and our students. I committed myself to doing just that at the beginning of the year. Most of our teachers have some sort of bulletin board where students post their reflections. I started with a wall outside the computer lab that said “Learning that Stuck.” At the beginning of the year, I had students write their reflection on a post-it note and stick it on the wall.

Since I have over 300 students in the computer lab each week, the wall became a little crowded. That is when I decided to go to a digital solution. After the first two weeks of school, we began using Padlet to post our learning. It is very easy to create a qr code with the url generated in Padlet so other teachers, students, and parents can easily scan the code to see what students are saying about their learning. Right now it looks like we have plenty of room to share our Learning That Stuck.