Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Reflection in learning

Thank you to everyone that sent me your words for 2020. I really enjoyed reading them and hearing your thoughts. I've decided to choose the word "Focus" because I find that I let myself get distracted by competing priorities and I'm working to strike that proper balance between family, work, and my grad classes.

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:

Add these to your teacher toolkit.  Now here is a reflection question for you:

What does it mean to have usable knowledge?

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Resolutions

It's 2020 and I spent some time over the holiday break reflecting on 2019.  There were many things worth celebrating, but I was disappointed to find that I had let the blog slip away to some degree, and I am starting recommitted to writing it more regularly.  With new beginnings comes the opportunity for recreation.  While the blog had focused on edtech integration in my time as a librarian, I would like it to have a wider focus since I have a new role.

With that idea came a post from my friend Lauren, a special educator in New Orleans, LA.  She posted about her word for 2020 and what she would strive for as an educator.  Being a member of a professional organization allows me to feel empowered by like-minded educators, which is why I felt so inspired by her word: catalyst.  She seeks to be the catalyst for positive change in education.  What a goal!

While I would love to steal her word, when I look up the definition of catalyst, it mentions that it "speeds up the rate of change without being changed itself", which just doesn't fit for me.  I recognize that there is no change that I could be asking or leading for others that would not impact me in some way.  So I need to find my own word.

So I will spend some time reflecting over the next week on my word.  I'm going to pour over some websites related to creating goals:

What will your word be?  Share it on the padlet below.  You may choose to share your name as well or leave it off.

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