R is for Reflection

Lynn Thomas 🇨🇦
Teachers on Fire Magazine
2 min readDec 20, 2019

I began the year with some goal-setting in the form of #OneWord2019.

Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash

Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

Usually, when we talk about reflection in education we are referring to assessment and evaluation. We evaluate through reflecting, that is, thoughtful consideration (#7) or meditation (#6) on something. Both of these qualify as the action we take as educators to assess and evaluate — whether it be our students or ourselves.

It’s interesting, then, to view reflection through its other lenses. I’ve not thought about reflecting as producing or influencing something before, so it forced me to question what I’ve produced by reflecting. What did I influence? And finally, it made me consider that what is reflected back to me is in direct correlation to what I emit.

I began the year with some goal-setting in the form of #OneWord2019. The word I chose was a bit unusual compared to the normal gamut, but as I explained in my post a year ago, it works for me. In a nutshell, knit, was my word because it encapsulated the “Cs” that made up my goal for the year: consolidation, creation and creativity, coding, and calm.

Reflecting in an evaluative sense, I still have some work to do. But if I consider the other ways to think of reflection, I feel accomplished, primarily because I like what is being reflected back to me.

So, what reflections am I sending out to the world? Well, here’s a collection from the year: Best of 2019 Wakelet.

As you ponder the year as many of us do, consider not just what you are putting our there, but what you are getting back because that’s part of you reflecting back.

Originally published at http://wordsgrow.com on December 20, 2019.

--

--

Lynn Thomas 🇨🇦
Teachers on Fire Magazine

Secondary English Teacher, MIEFellow, HP Teaching Fellow, ProjectKakuma, Teach SDGs Ambassador, NatGeo Cert. Educator, ECOO.org President, Writer TeachersOnFire