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Let Flexibility Lead To Alignment

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  In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
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Reflect to Assess to Progress

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Over the weekend, I read Teaching Students to Self-Assess by Starr Sackstein.  It was a fantastic read.  The book focuses on the importance of reflection in the learning progress. This post only provides a few highlights. Her book has great student examples of reflections and discusses tracking progress over time using reflection.  I highly recommend reading and reflecting on what her book sets out.

Why is reflection so important?

  • If we want students to become more independent, life-long learners, they need to understand how they learn.
  • Reflection involves analysis and evaluation which are higher order skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
  • The results of reflection will help students make informed choices about how they personalize learning.
  • The results of student reflections will help instructors modify their instruction to reach all learners.
How does reflection fit into the learning cycle?
The graphic below is one I made last month after reading John Hattie's Learning Made Visible.




I’ve created a new graphic to highlight how reflection fits into the process.







Sackstein does a wonderful job outlining how to build reflection into the classroom over time.










I’ve formatted her guiding questions into the Google Form below.  She is a champion of Google Forms for collecting data.








Once students are ready for narrative reflection, she recommends the following guidelines to be easily accessible in guiding the process.



Ultimately, students are writing reflections for themselves but they could be very informative for others.  So, collecting reflections in a format that can be shared is ultimately the final stage of reflection.  

Essentially, this blog is an attempt to make my reflections public.  Sackstein advocates that teachers model their process for students.  I hope to be able to bring my process into the classroom and make it transparent for students in attempt to show the importance of reflection.
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