Teaching and Thinking (Session 1 Capstone 2)

[Susan]

I found this week's Capstone 2 readings on reflections very interesting. I am always telling my students that the most powerful thing I can teach them is HOW to think instead of what to think. While students undergo formative and summative assessments on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis, how often are students given the opportunity to simply reflect on the learning process? Not often in my experience. 

In my readings this week, I have learned that there are four modes of thinking as proposed by Grimmett in 1990 and reflective techniques for each mode. The four modes of thinking, technological, situational, deliberate, and dialectical, all require introspective and critical analytical skills in order to successfully reflect on needed and desired outcomes. Narrative reflections are expository writing that enable the writer to state what happen but in order to be truly effective reflective writing should involve both a dilemma and possible solutions ( a la the original Dewey model of reflection).

I would like to try to institute reflective thinking with my students using either the library’s wiki or a Google doc.  I thought at first to have each student reflect individually, but after reading Lana Danielson’s article, “Fostering Reflection” in Educational Leadership 66(5), in which she wrote “reflection is a skill best fostered with colleagues,”  I think that I would like to have the students work together on reflecting on their learning. I am thinking maybe it could be presented as a group interactive workbook since the students are familiar with interactive notebooks at my school. If each grade level was given its own collaborative document to use as a reflective tool after a particular library lesson, the students and I would both be able to determine the success of the lesson as well as collaborate in order to improve both the lesson and the instructional methods used.

In conclusion, I am hoping that with this new blog I will also be presenting a reflective journal of learning as I progress through my last step in the Capstone trail towards ISTE certification.