Journals and teaching students to reflect.

The ability to introspect and reflect is something that needs to be cultivated in most people. You may ask a number of people, “What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?” and get fairly quick and concise responses. Ask those same people, “Why is ____ your favorite flavor?” and you will immediately be able to gauge how well your population of people can reflect.

Education needs to be an active process. A process in which the student is assessing what is known and what still is unclear so that the student can then plan for some action to resolve those unclear items. The first step of creating active students is to teach them to be able to reflect on how they are thinking, what is their rational, what are their feelings and what are their values around almost any topic. This is typically not something most students are comfortable with processing and may find even more difficulty in communicating. One of the safest ways to help students start communicating is with a journal. This may be a written journal, a verbal journal, or even a video journal.

Many teachers that have tried to introduce journaling have quickly encountered difficulties in getting students to provide verbose and relevant responses to teacher prompts. Remember that students will be trying to learn how to mentally reflect on your prompts and they will be learning how to communicate those thoughts. Both actions can be difficult. I would suggest you start with a concentration on the journaling and slowly ramp up the quality of the student responses. Most importantly, teachers will want to create instances in which the processing done in the journal are needed to resolve later problems or issues.

I offer the following sample journal template you could use for a first session with students. This is a google document. If you are familiar with google documents you can click on File - Make Copy to have a copy of this form available for you to use. If you are setup to have students using google documents, you can make multiple copies of this journal and just rename each file with the student’s name and then use the sharing settings to share with each student. Of course you can print out the forms as well, but I would suggest adding more lines in each answer box to allow for students to provide full responses.

In this sample journal entry, the goal is to get students thinking about what they value in games and how those values compare and contrast to students in the class. Begin the session by having students think about the games they like best to play. Try to get them to extend to 3-5 games and they can be digital or offline games. Then have them record what they value most about those games using the first prompt in the Journal.

Next students will circulate (make sure you state a given time and call out a count down at half way, ¾ way and last 15 seconds) quickly comparing their three values with those of others to determine how many students match them at all. If there is a match how many values are similar. Have students get re-seated and do a quick go around to see how many found at least one other that had 3 matches the same, how many only 2, 1? Then provide them a short time to revise their three values to adapt their previous thinking to account from all the input they just received from peers.

Now armed with data and experiences, the teacher poses the real problem for this activity. What is the best method of grouping students if the ultimate situation would be 5 students in each group. Collect all the responses and share with students that you will look over the suggestions and present next class the most popular options for the class to decide on.

This lesson is not about academics, nor is it even really content oriented, but it will create a first experience of Reflect - Act - Reflect - Process - Evaluate. In future entries we can pose an essential question, then have students “play” to collect data and then use that data to construct responses and process issues. Given this kind of experience, the teacher can then tie the experience into more traditional lecture content that takes advantage of the “What if..?” excitement generated.

Since no one responded to the question posed in the last post, I will offer a more simple quandary. You may have heard the expression, “The squeaky wheel gets the most grease.” Please indicate general subjects you with to see demonstrated in future entries. My natural inclination is towards the Mathematics end of things as so little exists out there for higher level mathematics “play”. Every entry I will try to include little suggestions for subjects and for different grade levels, but unless I receive suggested content and grade level requests, I will probably stick to high school level mathematics. So, if you want other content or grade levels included, or if you want to ensure I stick with concentrations in mathematics or high school, this is your time to speak up :) Please offer your comments and suggestions.