Building Reflective Practices

 Hey Fast Llamas!

Today we are going to talk about building reflective practices in our students.  Teaching students how to learn (metacognitive practices) is a super powerful tool in your students growth as learners.  And, it can be done virtually too.  

As we are getting better more at ease with loading content onto the Schoology platform, we can now move toward those practices that we were using in the classroom that we know helped students become more autonomous learners.

Here are some tips in developing reflective and metacognitive skills:

1.  Learning Maps - This is a great tool to use with students, so that they can see what big ideas they will be learning for the upcoming unit.  A Learning Map is a graphic organizer showing students where they are headed for the next couple of days of learning.  What's great about Learning Maps is their ability for students to make connections to previously learned knowledge.  

• a quality learning map is created with students, is referred to often and finds its way onto the review, and are handwritten on sheet of paper... keep it simple
• learning maps help with recapping information each day because it reviews content studied the previous day
• learning maps help with the closing of the lesson and again a final review of the day's lesson

Here's a Quick Video:

2.  Reflective Practices - We can build this into the lessons with discussion posts, creating activities that allow students to set goals and using reflective worksheets.  

Here is an example of a reflective worksheet  I found online:

3.  Purpose:  This ideas is aligned with learning maps.  We want to show students the "why" of what they are learning.  We want to make sure that we are being purposeful and repetitive in our statements of objective and learning goals.  This can get lost in the virtual world, so we need to be purposeful about it.

Again, as we are getting ahead of the work of putting content onto the Schoology platform, I believe we can start adding in these sorts of activities for students.  Teaching students to set goals, allowing them to see the "Big Picture" of the unit lessons and teaching students reflective practices will improve the level of engagement for students and will increase "Buy-In".  A Win-Win for all involved.

Resource:

http://thecreativeclassroom2013.blogspot.com/2016/12/12daysofchristmasbloghop.html

Jim Knight PlayBook:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tQRHUTcEZyt7FjLasSLLGOQP08mVi4DF/view?ts=5f63d7b5