Reflection on doing reflection
First blog post! 😄
Its been a month plus since I started my teaching journey at AES.
One thing that caught my attention was that many students in AES care a lot about their grades.
After sitting for their weighted assessment, many would come anxiously asking if they passed or did well. When I return the scripts to them, the first thing that most students would do is to compare their marks with their peers and proceed to take out their calculator to calculate if they met their target grade. While it is good to be motivated to want to excel and achieve their target grades, I felt that students also need to understand that assessment is for learning and personal growth. As a result, I started a simple reflection exercise with my classes. After going through the corrections and markers comments for the WA, I got the students to take some time to reflect on their progress and jolt down their responses for the following questions:
1. What is one area that I did well?
2. What is one area for improvement?
3. What can I do to improve?
What is one area that I did well? This question is to get students to reflect and celebrate their little successes. Be it simple things like being disciplined to start revision early, having good time management and completing the paper on time. This allows students to realise and remember the good practices so they can replicate their success.
What is one area for improvement? Based on the feedback received and corrections done, this question allow students to better understand the areas they are weak in so they can make a conscious effort to work on these aspects.
What can I do to improve? Knowing their weak areas, this question prompts students to take practical steps to do better in future.
Reading the students' reflection also helps me to better understand their learning gaps so I can prepare my lessons accordingly. Currently this reflection exercise is kept at a personal level. However moving on, I may consider getting some students to share their good practices so the class can learn and progress together. 💪
I think getting the students to reflect is very important and it's definitely good to get the students feedback to help you plug their gaps. This is in line with what Dylan William's say in how to do carry out AfL - Students as owners of their own learning and Activating students as instructional resources for one another.
ReplyDelete"Students as owners of their own learning. In one classroom where I’ve been doing some observation, every student has a disc which is red on one side and green on the other. When the lesson starts the green face is showing. The teacher goes through an explanation of the topic and if a student doesn’t understand what’s going on, they just flip the disc over to red. As soon as one student flips the disc over to red the teacher picks on a student who’s showing green and that student has to come out to the front of the classroom and answer the question that the student who’s showing red wants to ask. This technique is interesting because it embodies both pedagogies of engagement and pedagogies of contingency. In that classroom there is nowhere to hide because you’re either saying you understand or you’re saying that you want some help so that students are required to think about whether they understand or not (what psychologists call metacognition). The strategy is activating students as owners of their own learning, but it’s also allowing the teacher to be responsive to the students’ needs. Another teacher who tried this technique found that the discs were too difficult to see, so she went to the Party Store and bought red and green paper cups which were easier for her to see. It is really important that these techniques can be modified and adapted but it is also important that they embody the five key strategies, because otherwise we have no evidence that they are likely to be effective.
Activating students as instructional resources for one another. One technique that facilitates students helping each other in their learning is the “pre-flight checklist”. Before a student can submit, say, a lab report in science, the teacher requires the student to get a peer to complete a pre-flight checklist, which includes items such as whether the diagram is in pencil and labelled, whether it includes a title, a margin etc. The student can’t hand in the report for marking until he or she has had this pre-flight checklist completed by a peer, and the peer has to sign that the check is complete. Then, if there’s anything that’s been missed on the pre-flight checklist that should have been there, it’s the student who did the pre-flight checklist that’s in trouble, not the person who submitted it. In this way one can force students to take seriously providing support for each other. The interesting thing about this technique is that it involves at least two strategies. It involves activating students as instructional resources for one another, but the person who completes the pre-flight check also has to understand the success criteria, in order to complete the pre-flight check. Furthermore, once students internalize the success criteria when assessing another student’s work, it also enables them to use the insights gained in their own work."
A bit cheem lah but food for thought.