The Final Stop…Or Is It?

I feel like the time since our last F2F session has flown by and I can’t believe we are just a couple days away from our final meeting!

During the last F2F session, I made a slight change to my HMW question. I am looking at the role of personal reflection in the classroom. My wording before was looking at it’s ability to improve student engagement and metacognition. However, I changed the word engagement to initiative as I found that the challenge I was having pertained more to initiative. My students were engaging with their reflections and improving their metacognition, but they were not following through with the next steps they had set out for themselves. This was the most important part for me because if they could not use their reflections to improve their work, then I would not see the growth I hoped for. I think using the word initiative more accurately reflects the question I was trying to explore.

As I went about implementing some of the changes I wanted to try in my classroom, there were some useful resources that sparked ideas along the way.

There was an episode from the podcast Teaching Tomorrow titled “How to help students actually learn from your feedback” that inspired me. I wanted to improve my students’ ability to reflect on their work as well as the feedback I was giving them. I liked how Jodi Rice mentioned the importance of having students identify plausible next steps to improve their work. I took this idea and used it to improve a template I was already using when my students were reflecting on their work and my feedback. Below is a small sample of what I have them fill in now when reflecting on their writing.

I think this change is helping my students be more accountable as they must record a step they will take based upon their reflection and my feedback, then check off when they have completed that next step.

I also read an article recently that reminded me of how important it is for students to have the chance to reflect and discuss what they are doing well. I have always done this orally with my students, but now I’m making sure that we write it down. When I meet with my students for reading conferences, we now record mine and their positive reflections about their reading to remind them of their successes and what they should keep doing. Then we record their areas of growth and next steps. I have found writing it down helps them remember their successes and next steps so that when we meet next time, they are better able to articulate what they have been working towards.

Here is a link to a Prezi I made outlining my key learning and reflections from the exploration of my question for this cohort season.

As I mention in the Prezi, I had many things I wanted to change and work on related to my question. I definitely didn’t get a chance to implement them all. I remember hearing advice from people who had participated in Cohort 21 in the past about the importance of having small goals. I understand what they were talking about now! The everyday demands of school life definitely pulls you away from achieving everything you set out to at the beginning. However, now I have some next steps that I can continue working on in the future. I especially want to work on implementing more opportunities for reflection within mathematics! And so the journey of promoting student initiative and metacognition through personal reflection continues…