EMILY MACLEAN
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • About
  • Connect
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • About
  • Connect

September 05th, 2015

9/5/2015

0 Comments

 
As I read the article by Hume (2009), I thought about how I have my own students reflect on their work. I agree with Humes that a more structured format with guidelines is often needed in order for reflection to have depth. This makes me think of my Year 5 class and their e-portfolios. For their e-portfolios, each student needs to choose a number of pieces (I ask them to choose a minimum of 8) to include in their e-portfolios for each unit of inquiry.

Similarly to Hume, when I first began teaching Year 5, I just had students reflect and I was getting very surface level reflections such as “I chose it because I did well and I had fun.” After the first unit, we talked about making our answers like big juicy hamburgers rather than skinny grilled cheese sandwiches in order to get some meat into our work and show our thinking. It was amazing to see how the visual comparison of the sandwiches really helped the students as well as the discussion of questions that should be answered. We created a sample reflection example together as a class for an activity we had done as a class as an exemplar as well. For every piece they reflected on, they would have to answer the following questions:

- What was the piece of work you chose? 
- What were you trying to achieve/learn? 
- What did you learn?
- Why did you choose to include it? (challenge, growth, best work, etc) 
- What transdisciplinary skills did you develop/use? 
- What attitudes did you demonstrate and how? 
- What learner profile attributes did you demonstrate and how? (We are a PYP international baccalaureate school (IB)
- Can you connect this learning to something else from the past? How will this help you moving forward?

The other thing that also motivated students about their reflections was when they knew their reflections were going to be read. In the beginning, it was just me (their teacher) reading their reflections but I also spent a fair bit of time commenting back to them. My goal was to help to extend their thinking by asking at least one question back to them to make them think about what they had learnt. From there we started to get the parents involved in the reflection process. At the end of every 6-week transdisciplinary unit, the students were required to share their e-portfolio with their parents and the parents were required to comment on a minimum of 5 pieces. This opened the dialogue at home about what was happening at school and often would lead to more conversations and inquiry about the unit itself. The students always wanted to show their parents quality work so it helped them maintain a higher standard knowing their parents would see their work whether it was finished or not. Lastly, we started to share the e-portfolios with peers. This was a more challenging task as not only did you have to have students reflect on their work but you were asking students to reflect on the reflection and work of someone else. This was also a skill that had to be modelled through examples and repetition. By creating a diverse authentic audience, the student placed more pride in reflecting more thoughtfully. From there, it was all about feedback. When students showed me their reflections, I would ask if their reflection was a juicy hamburger or grilled cheese? If it was a grilled cheese, they knew they needed to spend some more time on it. My students were allocated time in class to do the reflections at least once a week plus often when they finished a task they would add it directly to their e-portfolio. This allowed them the ability to succeed as suggested in Humes article.

One of the things I appreciated about the journal article by Hume is that she was essentially doing what she had asked of her students. She was reflecting on her learning and thus providing everyone who reads the article an exemplar of a reflective journal entry. I believe it is important for teachers to model what we are expecting our students to do as teachers. About a year ago, I began blogging online and reflecting on some of my teaching practice. When I began having conversations about reflection with my students in my second year of teaching Year 5, it had more meaning for me as well. Seeing as I was doing frequent reflections, I could talk about my own experiences of reflecting, the challenges I would face and why it was something I chose to do on my own accord. I even showed my students a blog post or two giving them examples of when they would use their reflective skills outside of the classroom. By giving reflecting a ‘real world’ setting, it helped many of the students continue to push their reflections further. It was evident Hume had reflected regularly throughout the process and changed her thinking and action plan accordingly to best fit the needs of her students - a sign of a good teacher.

References
Hume, A. (2009). Promoting higher levels of reflective writing in student journals. Higher Education Research &Amp; Development, 28(3), 247–260. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360902839859
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    August 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014

    Categories

    All
    21CenturyLearning
    ACARA
    Accountabilitty
    Action
    Assessment
    AUP
    Beliefs
    Capacity
    Caring
    Challenge
    Change
    Classroom Management
    Coaching
    Code Of Conduct
    Collaboration
    Communciation
    Community
    Connections
    Connectivism
    Constructivism
    Creating
    Creative Commons
    Curriculum
    Design
    Digital
    Digital Citizenship
    Digital Literacy
    Distance Education
    Documentation
    EdLeaders
    Education
    EMT503
    EMT504
    ERR501
    ESA501
    ESA513
    ESC515
    ESC516
    Excursion
    Game Based Learning
    Gamification
    Gender
    Global Connections
    Google
    Gratitude
    #gratitude #positiveeducation
    Growth
    Growth Mindset
    Holistic
    Innovation
    Inquiry
    Inspiration
    IWB
    Labels
    Leadership
    Learning
    Literacy
    Mandarin
    Mathematics
    Mindfulness
    Mistakes
    Motivation
    Music
    Online
    Parents
    Passion
    Pastoral
    Pedagogy
    Perserverence
    Perspective
    Plagarism
    PLN
    Portfolios
    Positive Education
    Positive Leadership
    Presenting
    Privilege
    Professional Development
    Professional Learning
    Provocation
    Public Speaking
    PYP
    Reflect
    Reflection
    Relationships
    Research
    Responsibility
    Risktaker
    SAMR
    Sharing
    Skills
    Social Media
    Student Agency
    Teaching
    Technology
    TPACK
    Transformation
    Typing
    Values
    Websites
    Wellbeing
    Writing

    RSS Feed

    Tweets by @msemilymaclean
© COPYRIGHT 2021  EMILY MACLEAN.​ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.