Self Reflection About How Others Help You Learn

This week’s article summary is Self Reflection Goes Beyond Self.

Last week’s summary focused on how metacognition benefits learning, and personal reflection/evaluation is a great way to help students think about what, how, and why they’ve learned.

Many of us routinely ask our students to reflect on what they’ve learned, yet this article recommends we expand reflection to include how others helped us learn.

Particularly as collaboration and cooperation become more and more prevalent in classrooms, asking students to reflect not just on what they learned and how they’ve grown and changed but how others helped and supported helps them see how important others are in our personal learning journey.

Joe

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Grading, testing, and ranking work are easy guidelines for students to measure achievement.

However, because these can’t illustrate student experience and growth, teachers often turn to self-reflection projects to help students discover reasons behind success.

Sixth-grade English teacher Lauren Porosoff says she has always included a self-reflection exercise in her end-of-year curriculum. But this year, she found the assignment to be too individualistic.

“I wasn’t offering my students an opportunity to examine another crucial part of their experiences: each other,” she said.

A recent winner of the Editor’s Choice Content Award or her blog post “Teaching students to see each other,” Porosoff created a self-reflection questionnaire that pushed her students to acknowledge how classmates and peers could provide opportunities to affect personal success.

“It is important that they learn to acknowledge other people, and also be acknowledged,” she said. 

Porosoff included three additional questions to her usual assignment:

1. Who in our class supported you in an important way?
2. Who in our class pushed you to think differently or more deeply?
3. Who in our class inspired you by setting an example?

Porosoff said that identifying peer impact gets students to think critically about everybody’s role within the classroom.

“It gets the students to look around the room and think to themselves: ‘Wait a second, the kids in this room should be pushing, supporting and inspiring me’ or ‘I could be the type of kid who supports, pushes and inspires my peers,’” she said. “Just that awareness, I think, has value.”

While they found the assignment challenging, student answers were specific and insightful, Porosoff said.

To her surprise, students also tended to discount social bias or privileged group associations, Porosoff said, noting that the children veered away from acknowledging only their friends, high-achieving classmates or vocal discussion leaders.

“They were able -- at least in the moment -- to see each other, appreciate each other’s contributions and build a sense of solidarity,” she said.

Porosoff recommends teachers incorporating peer reflection to keep answers private and allow opportunity for sharing.

Fostering Metacognition in the Classroom

This week’s article summary is Critical Thinking: How to Help Your Students Become Better Learners.

During our preplanning meetings, I mentioned that one of the best ways to foster student learning is through metacognition, or helping students to think about their thinking.

I like this article because it breaks down the learning process into three parts—before, during, after—and then provides questions you can ask your students to help them be more aware of how they’re their learning.

The term metacognition can seem very intimidating to kids—and even adults—yet this article logically breaks down how we all can think about thinking as we “effectively plan, self-monitor, and finally reflect” on any learning endeavor.

I quoted the article’s definition of metacognition during preplanning: “Building awareness, understanding, and control of one’s thought process.”

As a reminder, in addition to metacognition, the three other teaching practices that best support student learning are as follows:

• Clarity of purpose of school assignments: clearly and frequently explaining to children the why, how, when, and how they will demonstrate their learning
• Classroom discussions--with lots of open-ended questions and student-to-student talk
• Formative assessments, specifically the need we all have for frequent feedback

  

Joe

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Encouraging students to build awareness, understanding, and control of their thought processes – also known as metacognition – is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve learning.

It’s all about getting students to think critically about their own learning.

To help students begin to think this way, you can divide the process into three parts:

• Before a task (effective planning)
• During (self-monitoring)
• After (evaluation and reflection).

Help students understand the importance of preparation and an effective approach to setting goals. For good goal setting, you need to include a combination of both short-term and long-term goals, a focus on developing skills (not just desired outcomes), and consideration of potential obstacles. If students know what challenges may come their way, they should be better equipped to overcome them when the time comes.

It’s hard to manage our emotions and thoughts if we aren’t aware of what we’re thinking and feeling, i.e., self-awareness.

Research shows that self-awareness can be developed by encouraging students to keep a diary. It can help students to spot any trends and patterns, making it easier to manage emotions and choose effective thought processes before they get stressed about more difficult tasks.

If a task can be divided into the three stages of before, during and after, then it’s possible to help students improve their metacognition by getting them to ask themselves good questions at each stage:

• Before a task, ask questions such as “Is this similar to previous tasks I’ve done?” and “What should I do first?”
• During a task, questions such as “Am I on the right track?’ and “Who can I ask for help?” ensure students monitor their performance and make adjustments if necessary.
• After a task, students can reflect and learn on their experiences by asking “What went well?”, “What do I need to improve on?” and “What would I do differently next time?”

Making Learning Stick

This week’s article summary is Research Recommended Learning Strategies.

As we finish our first few days of school, this article is a reminder that the most effective learning (making content stick in our brains) requires us to be actively engaged in and aware of what and how we’re learning. As mentioned in preplanning, lecturing is poor pedagogy because it doesn’t require active engagement of the audience.

It’s not that the five recommendations below will be novel to most of you because I heard much discussion of them in preplanning.

Rather they serve as a guide and reminder to us as teachers to ensure we provide a host of tools to empower our students in their learning—and empowering students in their learning is one of our Pillars.

Whether it’s through My Learning, metacognitive strategies, class discussion, and/or end-of-week reflection on what was studied and learned this week, students need to be actively engaged in and cognizant of, not only what, but how they’re learning.

Thanks for a wonderful and special start to the school year! Enjoy the weekend and recharge your batteries for a full week on Monday!

Joe

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Below are some practical learning strategies teachers can use with students to help them learn smarter and with greater independence.

Explain It to Your Brain: One creative way for teachers to help to get students engaged in the process of developing effective learning strategies is to apply a metaphor we call “explain it to your brain.” Students who use self-explanation tell themselves what they are thinking and doing when learning. This strategy is closely related to metacognition, a characteristic of successful student learning and of professional success across careers. A favorite way to teach this skill is by modeling self-explanation aloud across contexts in the classroom. For example, when working at the board in math class, you might pose a question like, “How might I solve this algebra problem?” Then you could begin to talk through the problem aloud so that students can learn from your modeling how to engage in self-dialogue when problem solving, reading, or performing other learning tasks. After students have experienced your modeling across various examples, give them opportunities to use this strategy aloud too. Over time, the goal is for students to use this tool silently and independently. A number of important cognitive strategies are involved in the process of self-explanation, including integrating new information with prior knowledge, generating inferences when there’s missing information, and monitoring and fixing faulty knowledge. Students can self-explain when they problem solve as a way to help them decide how to proceed.

Take Brain Breaks While Learning: When students sit in one place trying to remain focused on instruction for too long, it makes learning difficult. The result can be lethargy, boredom, or acting-out behavior. Facilitate active engagement in learning by giving students an opportunity to move by taking short two- to five-minute breaks every 20 minutes or so during class time. This can help to get more oxygen to the brain. An example of a short brain break might be for students to stand up, find a partner, and take turns sharing something they have just learned. Another example is for teachers of students of all ages to lead a couple rounds of jumping jacks or running in place. PE teachers are great resources for providing suggestions for integrating movement into the classroom.

Self-Test for Success: Teaching students how to test themselves will provide them with one of the most powerful tools for reinforcing their learning. A simple, proven way to guide students to self-test is through the use of index cards. Ask them to decide: What questions do you think your teacher would include on a test or exam? Instruct them to create a list of the best questions they can think of—have them write each question on an index card and to put the answers on the back. Show students how to create an authentic practice test by selecting the same number of questions as will be on the test and allowing the same amount of time for answering the practice questions as they will have at test time. It’s good to use this strategy throughout the school year to give students practice. Especially the first few times this strategy is used, check over the cards after students have created them and give students feedback as necessary until they’ve learned the process.

Make Schedules and Pace Your Practice: Encourage students to create a study planner to build in time for going to class and the library, as well as for study sessions for distributed practice over time to avoid cramming immediately before test time. Some students (including younger ones) will need assistance setting up their planner and inspiration to use it. As students learn more new material than they thought possible, they’ll be motivated by their successes. It’s a good idea to advise students to plan in extra time, in case tasks take longer than expected, and to read ahead when possible. Teachers can also help students with distributed practice when they build in multiple periods of classroom instruction with a focus on the most important material to be learned. A good rule of thumb to remember: The brain needs at least seven to nine repeated exposures over time before new content is learned.

Teach It to a Friend: Emotions that are stimulated when students have an opportunity to teach what they’ve recently learned may create greater knowledge and memory. When teachers tell their students before a lesson that they will need to prepare to teach what they learn, pupils tend to work harder to understand the material, search for the main points, organize and apply knowledge more effectively, and score higher on tests. Researchers call these findings “the protégé effect.” We have found it works best to set up teaching pairs and allow each partner to have a chance to teach the other a part of the lesson. Teachers of elementary-aged children can ask them to tutor those younger than themselves.