Candace Byrne
Flex Day Spring 2010: GIFTS Workshop
Self-reflection Exercise
Rationale
Asking learners to reflect on writing assignments they have completed serves two purposes: (1) it encourages learners to acquire reflective habits of mind essential for doing good work and improving their work over time, and (2) it allows teachers to connect with learners’ judgments about their own process and product and to respond to that judgment. Some classroom structures continually move on to the next topic, the next activity, the next outcomes. Deliberate pauses to allow for reflection make learners more conscious of where they falter and where they achieve: it highlights learning as an ongoing problem-solving activity.
From the teacher’s point of view, learner self-reflections also have value. Reading learners’ reflections provides teachers with information we would not otherwise have. Their reflections often surprise and engage us. They connect us with individual learning processes. They offer us opportunities to target these individual concerns and achievements.
This particular, simple self-reflection is one learners use at the completion of each formal writing assignment. Because its form remains substantially the same through four or five iterations (to accompany the four or five major writing assignments in the semester), learners come to anticipate writing the responses. The substance of the questions helps learners internalize that writing, no matter how experienced or accomplished the writer, will most likely present trouble spots and proud spots and that it is rewarding to weather the trouble and arrive at the pride.
Materials:
Paper and writing instrument
Paperclip
Description:
Learners complete a deliberate process to produce a piece of writing. This process includes the following directed, recursive steps:
§ prewriting through a variety of exercises to capture ideas and detail that might be used in the writing
§ focusing to arrive at a central purpose and point for the piece of writing
§ organizing the information in the writing
§ drafting the writing
§ receiving feedback on the substance of the writing
§ revising both to respond to substantive feedback and to edit and polish
On the day that the writing is due, learners reflect on the following questions about their writing process and respond to them:
§ What gave you the most trouble? What was easiest?
§ Which aspects of the finished paper are you most proud of and which are you least proud of?
§ What questions do you have about this paper that you’d particularly like your teacher to address?
They then attach the reflection to their materials as they hand them in.
Processing:
Because learners’ reflections are attached to the top of the packet they hand in, I read these first. This allows me to read their work purposefully, attending to what they have written, acknowledging trouble spots and helping troubleshoot them, affirming successes, allaying doubts, and redirecting attention when necessary. My feedback is more valued because it addresses what they have articulated.
As the assignments develop through the semester, I make various alterations to the middle questions, targeting them on specific aspects of writing we have centered on in the feedback process. For example, on an assignment when we pay a good deal of attention to structure/organization, the middle question might read “Which aspects of the essay’s organization are you most proud of and which are you least proud of?”
When I return their assignment packets to them, their reflections with my comments again lie on the top of the packet so that they read these first. As I comment on the work within the packet, I also include references to what they say in their self-evaluations.