The reason for choosing a word for your year is to reflect. Reflection and metacognition are powerful ways to make learning stick. So this post will explore techniques for incorporating reflection into your classroom.
According to Bransford et al. (2000), "Metacognitive approaches to instruction have been shown to increase the degree to which students will transfer to new situations without the need for explicit prompting." The strongest learning happens when the new knowledge can be applied in a different situation, as we know from models like Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge.
Some of our instructional practices already contain the opportunity for students to reflect on their learning, such as Everyday Math, which prompts teachers to ask students about how secure they feel on particular skills or topics. If you've ever used an exit ticket, you're using reflection.
Here are some effective ways to incorporate reflection in your instruction:
- White boards with reflection question - How do you feel about ______?
- I can do it!
- I still need practice
- I need help!
- Exit tickets with a question prompt
- Think-Pair-Share
- Journaling
- Flipgrid
- Sentence stems, such as, "I used to think...but now I think...."
- Interactive notebooks
Add these to your teacher toolkit. Now here is a reflection question for you:
What does it mean to have usable knowledge?
Usable knowledge is straightforward, actionable steps that can be practiced. Sometimes we are given these plans of use, but sometimes we have to create these plans on our own.
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