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Thank You for 20 Years.

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After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
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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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