I recently read an article about having students “reflect” on their work. I’m not sure what the value would be. What would this look like in a science class? –G., Ohio

At a professional development workshop several years ago, I heard a teacher say “I do lots of activities. My students are so busy, they don’t have time to think!” This statement haunts me to this day. I wondered what students learned by following someone else’s busy, fast-paced agenda of activities. It sounded exhausting, for both the teacher and the students.

Another time, I visited a classroom in a school that had 90-minute class periods. The teacher presented a series of activities, changing topics about every 15 minutes—lecture, worksheet, small group discussion, writing, hands-on activities, pop quizzes—but there was no common theme or unifying concept. These students were also “busy,” but I wondered what they were actually learning from this series of disconnected events.

From a Twitter recommendation, I recently read the article “You Really Can ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’” describing a study on the value of reflection.  (Note: the working paper Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance from the Harvard Business School is downloadable here.

The study shows that learning is more effective if a lesson or experience is deliberately coupled with time spent thinking about what was just presented.

For teachers who already use reflective processes, it’s nice to have validation from more formal studies. Although, as with any study, there are problems generalizing to other populations, subject areas, and learning tasks, it seems that doing hands-on activities or investigations is only part of the learning process. Giving students time to process and think about what they are learning pays off.

Reflection doesn’t necessarily mean students staring into space (although that’s what I do when I’m thinking). Reflection is a process that involves articulating or summarizing what was learned, making personal connections to what was already learned, and formulating questions for future learning. Science teachers often use notebooking, exit activities, KWL organizers, creating graphics, or talking into a smartphone or app for these reflections.

I suspect most of our students need some examples of reflective thinking, along with a rationale as to why it is important to learning. Your modeling and guidance is important. Show students how you would reflect on your own learning:

• I learned that…
• I learned how to…
• I need to learn more about…

It also helps if each activity includes an explicit reference to the learning goals to form a basis for reflection. For example: In this lab, we will investigate the relationship between…. As you use this online simulation, pay attention to…. The purpose of this word game is to check your understanding of the key vocabulary for this unit.

For projects, give each student a copy of the rubric when the assignment is given. Ask them to fill it out and submit it with the project, along with their reflections in the form of personal feedback. At first, I asked students generically about the quality of their projects. The usual responses were I learned a lot, I had fun, I worked hard, I spent a lot of time on this. This was not enough to be helpful.

So I found that giving students some guidance in the form of “story starters” helped them to reflect more on their work:

• From doing this project I learned…
• If I had more time, I could improve this by….
• The best part about doing this project was…
• To make this project better, I could…
• Our study team could have improved our work by…
• Take a look at this part of the project to see how I…

This could be an interesting action research project for your classroom!