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Provide Time for Daily Reflection

Tags

Social-Emotional Learning ^21st Century Skills All Ages Strategy

Skills

Verbal Reasoning Verbal Memory Abstract Reasoning Visual Memory

Provide Time for Daily Reflection

If your middle or high school student loses perspective on relative importance of work or you want them to go deeper in their understanding

Teach It!

  1. Objective: Students will engage in daily reflection to solidify the day's learning, address unresolved problems, and think about what they can work on.
  2. Teacher Takeaways: Self-reflection is a simple and effective way to review and solidify learning, answer open questions and get rid of some stress. Build in time each day for students to reflect on their learning or, as relevant, other events or happenings from the class period or day. There are many ways to engage students in reflection. Find what works most comfortably for your students. (Some options on next slide)

Options For Daily Reflection

  1. Open-ended Questions: Have students spend a few minutes at the end of class to think about what they saw or learned. Offer prompts for students to jot down notes, or think through and share. Example questions related to a lesson: What was interesting? Why is it important in the real world? What did you not understand? What questions do you have?
  2. Review and Preview: This form of reflection supports understanding and retention. Have students review class notes from a lesson and then preview content for the next day. Have students mark their notes and ask about things they didn't understand in class and what they might be wondering about the next day's material.
  3. Journal: Have students use a daily journal and spend a few minutes at the end of a class or day free-writing their reflections. Have students occasionally flip back to previous days and see how their thinking has changed. This is a less structured approach but can help students draw out important feelings and concerns they might have.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Research clearly shows that when we take time to reflect on what we have learned or seen, we are far more likely to retain the information in long-term memory, create connections to past experiences, and enhance our overall understanding. As we replay the day's events in our mind, we are re-experiencing them in a way and re-learning through re-exposure.

Best-suited for students with weaker: Attention, Long-term Memory, Metacognition (Source: Digital Promise Learner Variability Project)