Reflecting on Reflection

EDU 6120 Week 1

Metacognition plays a necessary role in the education process. As a contemplative and critical thinker a student can unlock their own continued curiosity, self-fulfillment and self-discovery, all of which are core aims of education. 

Students however, need to be given both structured time and strategies in the classroom to explore “thinking after.” It takes continued practice before it can become natural. I remember as a high school student finding it such “busy work” and completely boring when teachers would ask me to “reflect on my work.” My reaction was likely the result of my teachers only giving me the space and opportunity for reflection but not offering the most important components of reflection – the strategies HOW to reflect and also the WHY I was reflecting in the first place. Ultimately, a big hook for many students (especially I’d argue the higher performers in a class) is to let them in on the WHY of their work.

Students value intentionality and transparency especially when that deliberateness is what you are asking of them. As we discussed night one, the teacher plays a diversity of roles in the classroom and I have found that openness around ‘teacher as learner’ and what I am trying to learning from and about my students is simultaneously a way to gain their trust and also a way to model contemplative and meta-cognitive thinking as I investigate how my students are learning and what I can do to improve my practice.

Nowhere have I found the Latin adage “repetitio est mater studiorum” (repetition is the mother of study/learning) to be most true. The consistency required to get reflection exercises to stick can seem excruciatingly dull – not to mention the sacrifice to content time that reflection eats into. However, as Ellis notes, there are numerous academic studies that demonstrate the value of reflection and its benefits for the learning of knowledge. Thinking about how and what a student learned is of much greater value than simply getting students to recall key vocabulary words in a rote fill-in the blank exit ticket. 

I appreciated the tangible strategies that Ellis and Scheuerman lay out in their piece as a toolbox for daily self-reflections with my students. I must admit that I was a little worried that my first masters’ grad class about education history and philosophy might be too theoretical, but this list is already incredibly useful. I especially am interested in trying out the “Clear and Unclear.” This not only will provide me with critical feedback about what students took out of the lesson and how they organized it and will also provide a higher-order thinking task for my students (per Bloom or Marzano). This will challenge students to integrate and evaluate new information they’ve just learned and also provide me with crucial feedback about the day’s lesson.

I am also interested in using “This week in Review” to challenge students to make cross-curricular connections. Too often, especially in high school, students’ course work is so siloed that teachers and especially students are not making the useful connections between content and strategies in each of their classes. Whitehead agrees noting, “There is only one subject for education, and this is Life in all it manifestations.” Students noticing those parallels and zooming out to appreciate how their education is a unified process will help them to grow.

One of the easier ways I have found to introduce a metacognitive framework to my students is to begin the term with a learning styles inventory at the beginning of the term. This would ask survey-styled questions to get students thinking about their propensity toward visual, auditory or tactile types of learning.

Informally, I would poll them for moments or types of activities or even strategies (if they could frame it as such) that they had not enjoyed in previous classes. This probe served two functions. It demonstrated that I valued their opinion and wanted to learn from them. Moreover, it introduced the most basic form of metacognition – thinking about teaching strategies or environments that had not been effective for them.

This survey data gave me a starting point to gauge my different sections and could help me to create different small groups based upon different learning techniques and offer a diversity of media when it came to introducing and/or practicing content.