I always considered myself a very reflective person and I strive to include reflections in the classroom in an ongoing basis. I think student reflections can range from simple thoughts about what they understand in a given lesson to what they are proud about that they learned in the past week at school to explaining to their grown ups what they know about the unit in math they just finished and what kinds of questions they still have. All are reflective on learning and all are great ways to keep thinking about yourself as a life long learner.
We do a lot of reflecting in my third grade classroom - mostly in writing and some in video form. Reading about the different uses of reflection in George Mayo’s classroom, it made me really think about how to differentiate the kinds of reflections we do. My students are always so eager to do anything technology related and it’s a shame we don’t do so much of it in my classroom. Perhaps it would be really awesome for our students to blog or even just type up a reflection, but is it worth the amount of extra time it would take to do that on a regular basis? At what age do we start including these kinds of reflections or assessments into the classroom?
I understand how blogging can be such a powerful tool. Some children have a difficult time with the writing process or even just the act of writing. The computer and the blog can motivate students in a way that a pencil and paper won’t always, just as it did for the student in Mayo’s class. As wonderful as blogging about reflections is though, I also wonder how necessary it is to do all the time and how to balance blogging with handwriting. What’s wrong with responding on paper? This balance that needs to be created in classrooms is one that needs reflective teachers to think about the needs of their students in their classrooms to be determined.
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