Reflection

I have been thinking more and more about student reflections. Especially when working on big projects. Last year, I frequently suspected that my students had the feeling of, "OK, the project is done. I felt like it was exciting while we were working on it, but who cares." Even when I got students published or when we created something really unique, it felt sort of like another school project.

I would like to find a way to place these accomplishments more firmly in the realm of, "Hey, I participated in something unique." Maybe reflection is the path to this.

So, this year my big project that I am really focused on is a movie that we will make in my American Literature class. I will have students filming outside of class, and then editing it together to make a complete monologue in several different voices. More on that later.

This will also be tied to a unit on personal narratives which is really a form of reflection also, so students should be used to the idea by the time we get to the filming stage.

"... to reflectively experience is to make connections within the details of the work of the problem, to see it through the lens of abstraction or theory, to generate one's own questions about it, to take more active and conscious control over understanding." ~ From Teaching With Your Mouth Shut

What I am also going to have them do, however, is film a "making of" movie. I will explain that it will be to help other teachers be able to do a similar type of project in their class, but it will really serve as a type of reflection for the students, a way to talk about and display what they enjoy about the project.

Here are a couple of links that led me to this type of thinking. Peter Papas' article on Reflective Taxonomy and his blog including a Making Of Video. He didn't make the connection to reflective thinking in doing such a project, but that is what he accomplished.

Shelly Wright - Flipping Bloom's

Sometimes when I read something, I am just overwhelmed with the simplicity of the message. It makes me wonder how I lasted this long without ever reading anything like it before. The article from Shelly Wright was one of those moments for me.

In the article, Shelly describes how flipping Bloom's Taxonomy can make the classroom so much more project oriented and engaging for the students. Basically, she starts projects with the synthesis or creation part, and then backtracks through analysis and the other levels of Bloom's to arrive at knowledge. This makes so much sense to me.

Two things I feel deserve another moment to reflect upon are the value this style of teaching places on student's inherent abilities both to create and to reflect. If you run a class like this, you have to walk into it thinking, "Come on, you guys can do this. I know you can." Then, you also have to incorporate the act of reflecting on what the students created and on how they could improve it based upon their analysis of master texts.

This article makes so much sense to me. Thinking in this way will allow me to refine my practice in several of the units I struggled with this year.

See it at Shelly Wright's blog.

Technology Integration Prezi

Here is a prezi I put together for a professional development day presentation on why it is important to integrate technology into your educational practice. Click the forward button once to get it to load. You should be able to pan and zoom freely afterwards on the parts too small to see.

Technology Integration on Prezi

Reflections

My students get tired of doing reflections, but to me it is a more realistic way of grading what they really learned. Good questions and repetition lead to better reflections.

Here is a good article.

Student Reflections

Here are a couple of interesting posts about student reflections and the important role they play in learning. This is something I want to incorporate, but have not found a way to yet. Maybe I could try some of these.

http://www.peterpappas.com/2010/01/reflective-student-taxonomy-reflection-.html

http://www.peterpappas.com/2011/11/student-bloggers-reflect-progress-learners.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogs%2FcXqu+%28Copy+%2F+Paste+by+Peter+Pappas%29