Reflecting Deeper
How can I help students reflect better? How can I truly expect students to reflect deeper while not deepening their understanding of reflection itself?
These questions were running through my mind as I sat listening to an unlikely source for a potential answer. Ashley Collegnon, a colleague in the Greater Madison Writing Project, was offering her findings about mathematical justifications in her Teacher Workshop .
As Ashley spoke about qualities of an effective math justification, she described four potential modes of justifying: numerical, verbal, visual, and algebraic. She explained how students needed to prove their understanding by justifying their thought process and using at least 2–3 of these methods. During this time, I was struck by how each different mode built on the other mode to deepen my understanding of the math problem — a significant gain for me. Each mode changed how I saw the problem and allowed me to examine it in a different way.
My epiphany: my students need a variety of ways to reflect on their learning. Students often see deeper reflection as just adding more sentences and letters to a reflection until “Doucette feels as if I have finally fulfilled a requirement” and, to be honest, they may be right. But the question now sits: how can I create modes of reflection to deepen both student understanding of their writing and inform my teaching?
I’ve been seeking the answer to this ever since. And I am still seeking clarity.
I first looked at Gibb’s Reflective Cycle, referenced in many sources as a way for students to better reflect on their learning. It is a cyclical process that has students reflect by following their process through description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, criticism, and action to better facilitate learning from experience. While I loved the elements of the cycle listed, I still wondered about just having one mode of reflection: writing.
I worried about students like Evan. I just met Evan in my writing class last week when he turned in his first assignment and immediately caught my attention. The assignment was to write about a moment of fear, and Evan’s first two words in his response were: English class. He went on to describe the terror of the written word for him as he tends to think in analytics and numbers. While I enjoyed his response, his trepidation triggered something for me. Why am I not meeting the needs of all of my students? Yes, I will still have Evan write the essays, but can I offer him the means to reflect and learn in a manner that suits his needs?
I agree with the Pulitzer Prize winning Mark Van Doren who said, “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” So I want to be able to help everyone discover and process their own reflective practice about writing.
Because of this, I am working toward re-defining reflection in my classroom with various modes. As of now, these are theoretical concepts, but I am excited to try. I currently use student annotations, a written reflection, on their essays as a reflective tool for specific writing strategies. I also use verbal reflection in terms of writing conferences where students justify their process to me directly. Yet, these are ideas I have always used.
So my task is to create and discover new modes of reflection to deepen students’ understanding of the process. Perhaps I can use small group discussions, more use of verbal reflection where students can compare ideas and offer suggestions to each other. Maybe I could use a question focus where students reflect by developing questions to guide application of writing skills on future essays. Or maybe even some students could reflect by creating a flowchart that details their thought process in the actual essay; they could chart how the essays ideas flow and identify the writing techniques along the process that facilitated that thinking. And, for Evan, perhaps I can harness his quantitative ability by asking him to tally the number of passive vs active verbs, or he could work online to analyze the lexile levels of his own writing to consider issues of complexity in writing.
Will these ideas of reflection actually deepen students’ understanding of the process? Who knows? I am hopeful. But as I stated before, building each writer and meeting them where they need to be is my responsibility. So I must continue to honor this idea.
