As an educator going on 22 years, I have had a lot of time to reflect on my own practices, the practices across the school system and the vast changes to education across the globe. I have reflected on my personal experience as an educator and the learning I have taken from each student with whom I have had the privilege to work and learn alongside. Through my experiences with colleagues and how we are an educational ecosystem. I have also had experiences that allowed me to reflect at the macro level around the practices being implemented across a school board and the assessment and curriculum that have become catalyst to the types of educational practices that we see across the province.
Each experience has provided me the privilege to question, wonder, seek continued knowledge building, collaborate with colleagues to delve into learning together, to be open to life long learning and to the fact that learning is not about always getting it right, but about taking time to reflect on our impact. It is through this questioning and wondering that I have been able to challenge status quo in order to move learning to another place. It has allowed me to seek out comrades who are willing to come on a pro-active learning journey with me and to push my thinking and open myself up to understanding my personal biases.
I like to call these moments, "reflective check-ins". They are essential to my growth not only as an educator, but as a developing human being. Each check-in offers me an opportunity to ensure I have what I need to continue on my journey. They can be personal needs, work related needs, relationship needs, parenting needs, and the list can go on. They can be driven by those moments when something isn't quite feeling right, making sense to me, is a clear struggle or can even be moments when I feel all is moving along the right path and may not feel I need to reflect on anything. Yet, each reflection offers some form of growth.
Therefore, reflection is so embedded into how I learn and grow as a person, that I can't imagine it not having an essential role in all educational practices. Every individual learns from authentic and in the moment reflection and from an environment set up to be a safe place to voice thinking about personal reflections.
When you enter a classroom where each person understands the importance of authentic reflection and that they are safe to voice thinking, beliefs and wonderings, you see true learning come alive. It is what Daniel Pink refers to in his article, The Principles of Change - The Stories of Learning and Leading,
"Yet we too often focus on external “motivators” to be the driver for change or even learning. One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking in the past few years is how learning is such a personal endeavour, yet we try to package it up and decide the paths and passions for others. Stephen Downes summarizes this sentiment nicely:
“We have to stop thinking of an education as something that is delivered to us and instead see it as something we create for ourselves.”
Being true to the authentic learning moment we asked the students to reflect upon the collaboration challenges that the students had expressed feeling. Then they were asked to come up with possible solutions to each of the challenges.
Rola, continued today with open class reflection on how they were going to ensure that all student voices were being documented during today's group work. Students chose strategies from yesterday's list of ideas and implemented them with success today.
This kind of explicit instruction allows students to see how content learning requires effective collaboration and listening skills. It also offers opportunities to explicitly address SEL skill development, in this case, self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship skills. All of which evolved when opportunities were given for "reflective check-ins".
Each experience has provided me the privilege to question, wonder, seek continued knowledge building, collaborate with colleagues to delve into learning together, to be open to life long learning and to the fact that learning is not about always getting it right, but about taking time to reflect on our impact. It is through this questioning and wondering that I have been able to challenge status quo in order to move learning to another place. It has allowed me to seek out comrades who are willing to come on a pro-active learning journey with me and to push my thinking and open myself up to understanding my personal biases.
I like to call these moments, "reflective check-ins". They are essential to my growth not only as an educator, but as a developing human being. Each check-in offers me an opportunity to ensure I have what I need to continue on my journey. They can be personal needs, work related needs, relationship needs, parenting needs, and the list can go on. They can be driven by those moments when something isn't quite feeling right, making sense to me, is a clear struggle or can even be moments when I feel all is moving along the right path and may not feel I need to reflect on anything. Yet, each reflection offers some form of growth.
Therefore, reflection is so embedded into how I learn and grow as a person, that I can't imagine it not having an essential role in all educational practices. Every individual learns from authentic and in the moment reflection and from an environment set up to be a safe place to voice thinking about personal reflections.
When you enter a classroom where each person understands the importance of authentic reflection and that they are safe to voice thinking, beliefs and wonderings, you see true learning come alive. It is what Daniel Pink refers to in his article, The Principles of Change - The Stories of Learning and Leading,
"Yet we too often focus on external “motivators” to be the driver for change or even learning. One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking in the past few years is how learning is such a personal endeavour, yet we try to package it up and decide the paths and passions for others. Stephen Downes summarizes this sentiment nicely:
“We have to stop thinking of an education as something that is delivered to us and instead see it as something we create for ourselves.”
One such classroom has been set up by a phenomenal educator in our Ottawa Catholic School Board, Rola Tibshirani. When you enter this space you see visual representations and hear oral discussions evident of student thinking. You see explicit opportunities for students to reflect on themselves as learners and an openness to learning from and with each other. Rola herself opens herself up to working alongside colleagues to develop her own practices and to co-learn with her students and colleagues.
Yesterday, I got to become a co-teacher and learner with a group of grade 7 students that Rola Tibshirani teaches. We wanted to provide explicit moments of social and emotional development as students worked collaboratively in groups. Anyone entering the classroom during this time could easily think that all students in these groups were all contributing to the thinking about environmental issues.They were sitting together, no distracting behaviours were being manifest and visual representation of relevant learning was being put onto the chart paper.
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| Each student wrote a personal reflection |
But, on closer inspection, through "reflective check-in", each student was given a sticky to identify if they had a challenge working collaboratively. They did not have to identify which group they worked in, the purpose was to develop purposeful self reflection, or as we call it through social emotional learning, self-awareness. It was evident that although all groups had ideas written down, it wasn't without challenges. What was even more important was that there was more than one reason why the students had felt these challenges. We had hit the "reflective check-in" jackpot, as we were now hearing true student voice, experience and opening up moments for whole group reflection and awareness.
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| We took each reflection and put them into themes to use during discussions around strategies to support challenges. |
Being true to the authentic learning moment we asked the students to reflect upon the collaboration challenges that the students had expressed feeling. Then they were asked to come up with possible solutions to each of the challenges.
Rola, continued today with open class reflection on how they were going to ensure that all student voices were being documented during today's group work. Students chose strategies from yesterday's list of ideas and implemented them with success today.
This kind of explicit instruction allows students to see how content learning requires effective collaboration and listening skills. It also offers opportunities to explicitly address SEL skill development, in this case, self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship skills. All of which evolved when opportunities were given for "reflective check-ins".
