Reflecting on reflecting
To Be a Slave by Julius Lester is a book that Mrs. Baros is reading to the Getting Heard group. It has had a profound effect on them. Getting those feelings written down and on their blogs is no easy feat for these students. They really struggle. Mrs. Baros talked about reflections in class and how you have to make a connection. It can be a connection to your experiences, to a book, or to your personal feelings. Then she worked at taking them to another level encouraging them to think about the past and its effect on today. She encouraged them to think about what happened in history and what effect it had on them now. What difference has it made? What’s the big picture? When they write they put down words but the thinking piece of the writing is a major struggle.
This got me thinking about the importance of providing time in our classrooms for reflection. This is something all our students need to be doing, as well as ourselves. What does our learning mean to us? We ask our students to reflect on what they have been learning but once students learn something they need time to explore that so that they can focus on it and try to make sense of it.I fear our classroom have become places where we go from skill to skill in order to cover material on which our students will be tested. We need more time for discussions where students are doing much of the talking. Then we need time for writing. Writing helps students connect the dots in their learning. Writing takes time but as they write they are putting pieces together and making connections. They have to have lots of practice with this. Far too many of our students cannot write, and unfortunately I’m not talking about just the at-risk students.
Running out of time for reflection seems to continue throughout our lives. We get too busy. I started thinking about workshops and conferences where the reflective piece is put at the end and in many instances time runs out or participants are filling it out hurriedly in order to go to the next session. That’s a shame because those reflective pieces become meaningless if they are done in a rush.
I don’t think we do a very good job of having our students make connections to their learning. I think we need to start much earlier with this connection process and make reflection a viable piece in our classrooms. Our classrooms have to become places where we honor giving our students time to reflect. As for me, I am going to keep on reflecting on reflecting. Mrs. Neville and I are going to try to see how the second graders fare in this area. She is asking them some good questions on Becoming Authors.
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