The Power of Reflection

With 2009 drawing to a close now is a good time to reflect on the year and all of the highlights and challenges that occurred throughout the year.

As I prepare for the first two recruitment fairs in Sydney next week I have been reflecting on my recruiting experiences from earlier this year. I have been looking through my notes and my interview questions and thinking about what worked well, what needs to be improved, and what I have learned since then that can be incorporated this time around to enhance the interview experience for both myself and the candidate being interviewed.

While going through this process the power of reflection has really been evident - if we don't take the time to reflect and look for opportunities to improve then we run the risk of repeating the same mistakes, or even worse, we repeat a process that may be flawed. Modeling reflective practices for our students helps them to see the value in this process and enables them to engage in reflection of their own learning. Sometimes we see that the reflection can be equally as powerful as the learning process itself.

Being a Risk-taker

It is very easy for us to become so comfortable in what we do each day that we can shy away from opportunities to try new things. One of the great things about coming home to Australia and visiting family is that we get to try many new things, or at least things that we have done for many many years. My adventure yesterday is a perfect example of this.

My son has been wanting to go fishing for some time now, but we have not really had the opportunity to make this happen - it has also been over 30 years since I last cast a line. On Tuesday night my sister mentioned to me that the following morning she would be going fishing with her partner, so I jumped on this opportunity and asked if my son and I could go with them. She happily agreed, so at 6:30am on Wednesday morning we were putting the boat into the Elliot River. It was a magnificent day with an electric blue sky, crystal clear water, and some real quality time spent together.

We had a great time driving around in the boat and stopping at different places to try our luck with the fish. I was quite shocked and excited when I finally felt something pull on the end of my line, and when I felt the line being pulled away from me I was even more excited at the prospect of what might be on the end. After a good fight and some patience I finally landed what you see in the photo below - a 68cm barramundi!

Fishing is by no means one of my regular past-times, but this was a great opportunity to try something different and move out of my comfort zone. I hope this Christmas offers you the opportunity to be a risk-taker and try something different as well.

What do the students think?

Well it is the end of the first semester and we have finalized our semester 1 reports ready to be mailed home next week. At the end of each semester we have our students write their own report comment based on a template that guides their reflection in the following areas:

• What they have learned
• Their areas of strength
• Their areas for growth
• Their behavior and attitude
• Which IB Learner Profile they feel they have grown in and how this growth occurred

Giving the students the opportunity to participate in this type of reflection provides valuable feedback in a number of areas:

• The student comments are rich, detailed, and very personalized
• The teachers gain valuable insights into their teaching and learning practices from the students' perspective
• The parents are given specific information about their child's learning and behavior from the learner's perspective
  
• The students engage in authentic reflection that helps to determine where they are now, where they would like to be, and how they are going to get there

It is a very enjoyable experience to read the student comments as they are honest (sometimes brutally so), insightful, thoughtful, and from time to time funny! We don't often take the time to hear from the students and gain their perspective on their learning - providing the opportunity for students to write their report comments is one way that we can make learning and assessment something we do "with" the students rather than something we do "to" them.

I'm So Tired!

"I'm so tired!" is a statement that we here from our students quite frequently - I have no trouble admitting that the majority of our students sleep less than I do. It is amazing the number of emails that I receive, and I know the faculty receive, from students with a time stamp that is after midnight.

This quote from the ASCD journal, Educational Leadership, entitled Sleep: The E-ZZZ Intervention highlights just how important sleep is for young adolescents and how an increase in sleep each night can have a number of positive effects on our students and children:

Sleep-deprived students tend to be more restless, irritable, and impulsive than other students. They also may be more depressed and have lower self-esteem than their classmates who sleep more. The effect can go in both directions—sleep deprivation may cause emotional disorders such as depression or anxiety, and emotional disorders may cause poor-quality
sleep.

Ensuring our children get enough sleep each night is one aspect needed to help them achieve the IB Learner Profile of Balance.

The Finished Product

Yesterday I posted about my 3rd grade son making a Prezi for his pen pal in the US. Well here is the finished product:

Merry Christmas

Pretty good for his first attempt. The great thing about learning is that although this particular product may be finished, the learning will continue. I will reflect with my son about his prezi and what he thinks is good about it, as well as what he might do differently next time. We will also talk about communication and how it comes in many different forms - we might even venture into the message he was trying to communicate and whether or not he actually communicated his intended message.

This simple activity will lead to many days of spontaneous and impromptu conversations - I can't wait to hear what we will talk about!

I'm Ready to Learn!

About 3 weeks ago I was working on a Prezi at home when my son, who is in 3rd grade, came into the study and asked what I was doing. I showed him what I was working on and explained to him how a Prezi differs from a Power Point presentation. He said he thought it was pretty cool and off he went to continue playing.

Today I saw him in the hall with one of his classmates taking photos of different parts of the school. He explained to me that they were taking photos to send to their pen pal in the US so he could see what our school looked like. I thought this was a great idea and was impressed by his creative thinking.

On the was home this afternoon he asked me if I would show him how to make a Prezi - he had decided that rather than do a Power Point to send to his pen pal he would do a Prezi. I was very surprised that he remembered something I had shown him only briefly a few weeks earlier - I was even more surprised that he remembered enough about it that he thought this would be a good way to share some information and photos about our school with someone on the other side of the world. We discussed what he planned to do and he asked me if you could draw arrows in Prezi - I replied that I didn't think so and that I had never really tried before.

When we got home from school we created a free account for him and then I showed him some of the basics to get him started. I then left him to play around and explore this new program. After about 10 minutes he came into the kitchen and said, "I know more than you now!" He went on to explain that he had found how to draw arrows - so I sat down as he explained to me how to do this.

This was a wonderful learning experience for us both - we both got to teach and we both got to learn. It was clear that his interest was high in learning how to use this program, therefore he was fully engaged in what we were doing and his ability to learn and apply his new skills and knowledge was outstanding.

It is amazing what people, especially children and adolescents are capable of when they are ready to learn. As educators we need to be aware of these teachable moments and be ready and willing to capitalise on them - when students are interested in what they are doing and see a practical application for it then don't need to be extrinsically motivated, they are ready and willing to learn because they want to and because they see value in what they are learning.

1:1 Requires a Management Pardigm Shift

Working with students in a 1:1 laptop environment opens up many doors and opportunities for students and teachers to engage in meaningful and collaborative learning experiences. It also creates some challenges in terms of how we manage our own use, as well as student uses of the technology.

The following Blog entry and Slideshare offer some challenging questions to help us shift from a 'control' approach to more of a 'behavior management' approach:

Classroom Management in a 1:1 Enviroment Draft

Students making inappropriate choices has been something that teachers have had to deal with long before the introduction of computers in classrooms. To develop and support effective and powerful technology environments in schools we need to focus on laptop misuse as a student behavior rather than a result of having laptops in classrooms. Setting clearly defined boundaries that are applied consistently and fairly is one of the first steps to effective classroom management - this applies to using technology as well.