Locked in on reflection
Today I was thinking about reflections, Bloom’s Taxonomy, blogs, teaching and learning. I know, what a combination! But thinking about and discussing how we learn is time well spent in our classes. I was looking for a piece I wrote to parents on the school web site where I worked in the past. It had suggestions for parents on fusing Bloom’s Taxonomy throughout daily activities at home. I wanted to revisit that. I haven’t found that yet but I will.
My brain keeps locking in on the importance of reflection, but reflection from students mainly. I wish more teachers would use blogs for reflections about learning in our schools. I have tried to include as much time as possible for students to reflect about their learning when blogging. They really need to be thinking about what they are learning. Writing about this thinking can give them practice in discovering the meaning and the relevance of what they are studying. They can do this from their viewpoint. We teachers could learn so much. We need to give our students time to do this. I think this would be time well spent, actually it is a form of evaluation that can be of more use to us than any other test available. Also, we get the opportunity to guide them in thinking about their own thinking and foster independence in their own learning. These skills have to be learned, practiced and developed. If we have lots of students doing this, just think about the conversations that could develop and the connections that could be made. We have our students so conditioned to deliver what we want. How many times has a student asked you, “Is this what you want?” or “How many pages do we have to write?”, We need to work at creating a mindset with our students where they learn to defend what they want and write as many or as few pages needed to get their point across.
I find that when you first begin this process with students, they are clueless. They have not been asked questions about their learning. Now isn’t that strange? Why do we just focus on the what and not the how? Our journey of learning is so rarely discussed. That’s one of the marvels of blogging for me. People are doing that and I get to be a part of the discussions. Wow! I still get excited. We’ve got to move those converations among ourselves to our students. We need to talk about how we construct meaning as we read and write (blog). We must guide them. We need to talk with them about how reading and writing are the tools for making sense of everyday life. I remember back to the days when I was a remedial reading teacher and found that most of the students had no clue what the main idea was, cause and effect, etc. They just did the worksheets. That’s another story though. These conversations need to be held with middle and high students. I find them just as awkward with it as the younger students. We need to push their thinking, have higher expectations and they will respond. I think I need to work on the questions to ask to get them to higher levels. That will be my next post. I invite input.
August 12th, 2008 at 12:08 am
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