Thomas Brandt's List: Reflection

44 question prompts for reflective thinking

At its core, the six-word memoir teaches us to be concise but also introspective. The six-word memoir teaches all of us writers a critical skill: words are valuable and have meaning -- don't waste them.

Set aside time in your Friday schedule to have your students sit down and write a short reflection on what they learned during the week.

It is crucial to focus on engagement rather than management. In fact, Daniel Pink articulates this point when he talks about the workforce. It still rings true: "Management is good if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-directed is better."

A series of tools that can be used to support reflection, with a brief discussion of the process, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Strategies to help boost student engagement. You'll get project ideas, student voices, and classroom tips from some of our most popular bloggers.

Using VoiceThread as a digital portfolio for Student-Led conferences

Summary of research on journaling, favorite reflective writing formats, and labor-saving method of teacher response.

Blogs are a great way to encourage students to share their work, and to reflect on their learning (YIS IT Department)

The most important part of any social-emotional learning (SEL) or social-emotional character development curriculum (SECD) is skill development. But the formal lessons only serve to introduce the skills. Whether or not the skills are learned and generalized depends on the pedagogical procedure used.

Routinely asking students to ponder -- deeply and seriously -- what and how they've learned could be the "mind's strongest glue."

Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection." - modeled on Bloom's approach. It's posted in four installments:
1. A Taxonomy of Reflection
2. The Reflective Student
3. The Reflective Teacher
4. The Reflective Principal