michellemeracis

Michelle Meracis, Dallas Primary School and Kindergarten
 * Smart Thinking **

My students regularly reflect on their learning. They set and review personal learning goals and they comment on what they have enjoyed, learnt, improved in and still need to work on. Their comments, however, have generally been of a low level standard, just scraping the surface and providing minimal supportive detail. I have thought long and hard about what I can do to support my students with their personal reflections and how I can best equip them with the necessary skills to effectively reflect on their learning. It was when I was looking through my bookcase for texts on student self reflection that I stumbled across a book I purchased last year - //Smart Thinking - Developing reflection and metacognition//, written by Jeni Wilson and Lesley Wing Jan (2008). Jeni Wilson actually came to my school last year to work closely with the Years 3 to 6 teams on Inquiry Learning. She is an amazing woman. It must have been during one of my impulse purchases at Landmark (educational bookstore) after Jeni's initial visit that I added this text to the pile :) I totally forgot I had bought it. Funnily enough, both Jeni Wilson and Lesley Wing Jan were my university lecturers. I loved their classes and the practical ideas they presented. Even after all of these years... it's been a while since I was at Uni... I still remember and use some of the Literacy strategies they shared. In my eyes, they were truly inspirational. I can only dream of leaving a similar impact on my students :)

Please follow the links below to view:
 * [[image:smartthinking.jpg]] ||  || [[image:reflections.jpg width="641" height="304"]] ||
 * my learning journey
 * my students' reflections

I believe working with the students on their reflections and discussing with them why they feel a certain way, how they came to feel that way and what it is they have exactly learnt, improved in, want to focus on, practise, etc... has been the greatest success to my component of our project. Providing students with my own personal reflections as examples to build their own from has also helped them see that learning is ongoing. Just because I'm an adult doesn't mean I don't learn anymore or want to learn anymore. I constantly reinforce that we are all lifelong learners.
 * Successes**

I also feel that providing my students with a purpose behind blogging has given them a clearer understanding now as to why people blog. Although we didn't get around to setting up our own blogs on the internet to share with a global audience, my students did share their responses each other in class. For me, personally, this project was about reflecting on my practise and improving student learning outcomes in a particular curriculum area, such as writing. Learning technologies were a tool to use to support this. It would have been easy to set up individual blogs and instruct my students what to write each day, however, that isn't what I'm about. As I mentioned in my learning journey entries, student voice and student choice is central to my learning and teaching philosophy, hence me providing my students with the support to blog if and when they choose to.

I felt the greatest challenge was trying to change the way some students perceived reflections. For many, reflections were only related to their studies; reflections were only a sentence to say whether or not they liked something. I constantly had to reinforce the what, how and why:
 * Challenges**
 * what do you feel / did you learn / achieve?
 * how did you get to that result / how will you get there?
 * why do you feel that way / did you do that?

I'm proud to say that for the majority of my class, these are questions they will continue to ask themselves :)

During this journey, I observed my students support one another with their reflections by asking questions to gain more information. I'd like to focus more on questioning techniques, such as looking into the different types of questions and how to write responses for questions that require deeper levels of thinking. I have a number of texts on DeBono's Thinking Hats but I'm sure there's a lot more recent material out there to read to improve my own practise.
 * Where To Next?**

​Smart Thinking | Learning Journey | Reflections