When using this strategy, it is beneficial to provide an example. Additionally, allocating time for individual thinking is also essential. It is always useful to provide learners with a sentence stem.
Analogy prompt is a great strategy to help learners make sense of critical information and allow them to paint a picture of an important concept. I like to use analogy prompt in my teaching and teacher training workshops. Everyone comes with different experiences and cultural backgrounds. The use of analogy prompt makes discussion fun; allows learners to connect with their personal experiences in the process of making sense of a new idea or concept being introduced; helps them to visualise their thinking. It has been an effective meeting protocol for me when discussing important issues or ideas with teachers. I encourage my students to use analogy prompt to reflect on their learning process. Reflection doesn't have to be tedious. By making an analogy, it engages learners with deeper thinking. It is also a formative assessment strategy to monitor students' understanding of the concept that is being taught. When using this strategy, it is beneficial to provide an example. Additionally, allocating time for individual thinking is also essential. It is always useful to provide learners with a sentence stem. I worked with a group of student teachers from National Taiwan Normal University in October, 2018. I introduced the inquiry-based teaching and learning concept and students were engaged in conducting in an inquiry activity. We also explored different structures of inquiry and discussed the level of scaffolding required for each type of inquiry. At the end of the day, I invited them to consolidate their learning and reflection on inquiry-based teaching and learning by using analogy prompt strategy. These university students were so creative and I can't help to record their thinking in my blog. If you can know Chinese, they are really fun to read. These students had paint a clear picture of what they think inquiry-based teaching and learning is.
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Curated storytelling as reflectionChef's table, an original Netflix documentary series, is one of my favourite tv show. World's most renowned international chefs are interviewed in the show and they share their journey of being a chef through powerful storytelling. They talk about the trial and error process when crafting their cuisine. They reflect on their childhood and their relationships with people and/or with communities, and how they applied their new understanding in their food creation. Different concepts behind the dishes are beautifully illustrated through their narrative. Through their stories, the audience discover how these chefs make personal connections and find their own identities through their food. I am always inspired by the powerful messages and how concepts are synthesized and succinctly conveyed through their cuisine, through their stories. It's far more than just a dish. It's not just what they do. They care deeply about why they do it and deliberately tell their stories with curation. Through their stories, I've had an epiphany that creative and critical reflection with curation not only leads to innovation, but also identity formation. As reminded by John Dewey, the famous American educator and philosopher, "we don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experiences." It is through reflections that we connect dots (linking prior learning with new acquired knowledge, understanding and skills) and make sense of our experiences. It is a powerful way of thinking that helps us develop personal growth in all aspects and enables us to develop confidence and capacity. Examining attributes of successful people in different professional fields, we often identify one common quality that contributes to their success. That is being reflective. Having a reflective mindset has been crucial and will remain paramount for us when generating innovative ideas and solutions in the unknown future. Reflection (way of thinking) is a core element of the MYP inquiry cycle and assessed in different subject groups. Reflection requires intension and critical thinking (analyzing, inferencing, explaining, evaluating, conceptualizing). These are the skills that require explicitly coaching and scaffolding. Students are often asked to reflect through question and answer format, written communication or video recording. I sometimes feel that students perceive reflection is time consuming and tedious. If we, teachers as facilitators, are not mindful and intensional, students end up recording superficial random events of what happened but not deeply analyzing the 'how' and the 'why' for moving forward. Another observation is that students often collect 'everything' on their learning portfolio without editing. Instead, students should be taught and have opportunities to practice on how to curate their stories, focusing on quality but not quantity. Through curated reflective practices, students could be encouraged to think as an artist, a photographer, a food critic, a musician, a museum curator and so on. After reading Intension written by Amy Burvall and Dan Ryder, I begin to rethink the ways of how we could encourage students in reflecting critically and creatively on their learning. What are possible ways for them to make meaning out of learning experiences? Many creative ideas are provided in the book, Intension. I also re-read Jennifer Gonzalez's blog post, To Boost Higher-Order Thinking. Try Curation. I notice these great strategies engage students in using multimodal communication for reflective thinking tasks. It will make sense for students to reflect through multimodal texts as we currently live in an increasingly multimodal world. Teachers can guide students to reflect through different forms of modality. It is very important to set up 'creative constraints' and we also need to remember that "What matters is the quality of analysis, not the medium through which the evidence is delivered." Students must interpret their learning, explain and synthesize their thinking, and learn how to justify their choices. 10 ways to curate reflectionI have brainstorm 10 ways to curate reflections. (Curating about curation!)
Critical reflection is the process by which curiosity and experience can lead to deeper understanding. Learners must become critically aware of the way they use evidence, methods and conclusions. Reflection also involves being conscious of potential bias and inaccuracy in their own work and in the work of others. (MYP: from principles into practices, 11) Reference:
Why reflection?One of the goals for teaching is to help students transfer their learning and be able to apply their knowledge, concepts and skills in new contexts. We make an effort to implement a concept-based curriculum and hope this approach will help learners connect knowledge and develop understanding through different learning experiences. However, it is very difficult for students (or event adults) to transfer. The ability to apply knowledge and skills to new situations doesn't come easily and naturally. In order to achieve transfer, teachers must intentionally design learning experiences and build the lessons upon learners' prior knowledge. There are different ways to help students transfer what they have learned. I do want to emphasize the importance of creating opportunities for reflection and self-explanation in order to increase learning transfer. In order for students to transfer, we need allocate time for them to reflect, connect and contextualize their learning. Students should be engaged in critical reflective practices and construct meaning from their learning experiences. "To reflect, we must act upon and process the information, synthesizing and evaluating the data. In the end, reflecting also means applying what we've learned to contexts beyond the original situations in which we learned something." (Costa and Kallick 222) Reflection is such a crucial skill for students. I did a very quick key word search by typing #reflect in all MYP subject guides and also DP EE, CAT and ToK guides. The results include the following words, reflect, reflection, and reflective. It is so clearly that we absolutely need to teach students how to reflect if we expect them to complete the core elements in the MYP and DP successfully. Learning portfolio or process journal?In my school, MYP students create digital portfolios via Google Site. Previously, our practice did not make sense to me at all as students will create a new site each year for their learning portfolio. We decide to have students use the same google site this year and continue to build their portfolio as they progress in the MYP. I think by using the same website for their MYP learning journey will allow students to "visualize" how their thinking, understanding and skills have evolved. The data and student self-reflection documented on their learning portfolio can also become a powerful prompt for the 3-way conference (student, parent, teacher). Our dilemma is that teachers all understand and acknowledge the importance of giving time for students to reflect. But there are still some resistance from teachers and students to allocate time for reflection and use the learning portfolio to document the learning journey. One misunderstanding I have found is that teachers and students perceive learning portfolio as showcase portfolio. Students only reflect at the end of the unit and select their best work instead of collecting learning evidence and reflect critically on why they learn, how they learn and what they learn along the way. Another problem comes after this is that students are asked to reflect on all of their subject learning pretty much at the same time because our units start and end roughly at the same time. If I were a student, I certainly would not enjoy this experience. I have been thinking perhaps we should not call it learning portfolio, but instead, we should name it learning process journal, just the way we expect grade 10 students to document their process of making their personal project? Negative brainstormingI want to find out more what prevents teachers and students from using learning portfolio to record their thinking and reflections. Let's say I am a designer and have developed this product, learning portfolio. I want to find out what will absolutely make my clients, teachers and students, hate using this product. In our staff meeting, I ran an activity called negative brainstorming. I invite teachers to brainstorm the following questions:
This is my first time using negative brainstorming method and it is very powerful. What a great way to generate negative user experiences and think backwards to solve the problem! Here are the ideas generate by our teachers. It is very clear that students and teachers want to know the purpose of keeping a learning portfolio. What's interesting is that teachers do not want to spend time to grade or provide feedback to the student learning portfolio, but meanwhile, they also recognize that students will not want to keep a learning portfolio when there is no feedback and audience. Another issue is also true that in my school, only MYP students keep learning portfolios, but DP students are not. It goes back to the high-stakes DP exams and the heavy content leaves no room for anyone to reflect. As a school, our next step will be to identify possible solution to solve the problems and ensure a positive user experience. This post is writing to share various reflection protocols on the customized stikcy notes. Protocols included:
Reflection should not be a tedious process. Instead, reflection is a process that helps us develop identity and to undersatnd the meaning of our experiences. To facilitate student thinking and help students reflecting crtically and creatively, the role of the teacher is essential. The teacher must value reflection and act as a mentor by asking thoughtful questions and employing different strategies to promote personal development of students. Here are some sticky notes that I have created to support reflection. You can download the template here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PgCIPVrj70amUgMfz4HRinanQwtx13DAsLjLX6ortQ/template/preview If you are interested in making your own sticky notes, you can find clear instructions via Tony Vincent's website, Learning in Hand. In Tony's website, you will also find the printing instructions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. In short, you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, but you must attribute the work. This work is not for commercial purposes. ReferenceCosta , Arthur L., and Bena Kallick. “Chapter 12. Learning Through Reflection.” Learning Through Reflection, www.ascd.org/publications/books/108008/chapters/Learning-Through-Reflection.aspx.
This post is writing to introduce a reflection protocol: What? So What? Now what? to promote student reflection and critical thinking. Reflection Protocol: What? So What? Now what?Agile learners take time to reflect on their learning experiences and analyze their strengths and areas for improvement. They evaluate their performance based on evidence gathered. This is an important process for the learners to evaluate their learning and analyze their performing. School can become very busy and fast-paced for teachers and students. "Rigor" is a catch phrase in education and sometimes I think it cause more harm than good. The meaning of the word, "rigor", is very often misinterpreted and as a result, students are bombarded with endless content, class and assignments. In order for real learning to take place, I feel an individual must be given time and space to think and reflect. If we want to develop self-regulated learners, time and space must be provided for students to reflect and develop self-awareness of the challenges and obstacles they have encountered with. Furthermore, through critical reflection, learners can become mindful of their own feelings and learn how to cope with different emotions. The process of recognizing different types of emotions and acquiring strategies helps students to develop grit. Reflection plays a critical role in learning and we need to guide students to conduct reflect critically and go beyond the superficial level. "What? So What? Now What?" is a good protocol to challenge students to reflect beyond the surface level and require them to evaluate and analyze their performance. I found providing prompt questions and sentence starters is helpful and can scaffold students who are not yet comfortable in thinking and reflecting independently. Additionally, reflect comes in different formate. It doesn't always have to be written responses. Students should be encouraged to explore different ways for reflection. Feel free to make and copy and with your students. docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n89aGOnqpyNVrccHR58DxQSrNbr6Dh-N0ycboBqFt88/template/preview Note: Permission was granted by Portsmouth University to use the sentence starters. Full credits are given to Portsmouth University in this poster. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. In short, you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, but you must attribute the work. This work is not for commercial purposes.
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