Importance of Reflection

One of the most important ingredients in a visible learning portfolio is the student’s reflection on their work. Students should include reflections on each performance to clarify why pieces are included in the portfolio. This is perhaps the most valuable part of the portfolio, since it provides a much clearer window into the learning of each student. Student reflections help us discover and observe what students are really experiencing, thinking about, questioning, wondering about, trying, and achievements In the words of John Dewey, “We don’t learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” The tools used for creating digital portfolios make it easy to type or record a voice reflection.

Reflection can enhance authentic assessment as students determine how to grapple with real problems and challenges. Reflection supports the use of portfolios because it becomes the means through which students can study themselves and their work. It is also tied to rubrics because it enables students to refer to explicit performance criteria to monitor their learning. Finally, reflection is a staple of action research as teachers ponder, study, and evaluate their practices.

A reflective classroom includes both oral and text-based reflections. It is based in questions and routines. You might have specific questions students learn to ask – or you might use a scaffolded approach that starts out easy and moves its way to much deeper internal reflections. The end goal is to have students develop their own reflective practice.

As educators, our job is to help students make meaning of concepts and ideas. We want our students to construct knowledge, to be creators of their learning, not just consumers that parrot information. In the end, we want the experiences in our classroom to inspire curiosity and a love of learning that will last a lifetime.

A reflective practice, is an important shift that should be a top goal in a learner–centered classroom. It is not an easy process, so it often gets overlooked as teachers rush to cover content in an already overcrowded curriculum. The truth is, this step is probably left out for two reasons. First, it is not easy to get students who have never been asked to reflect on their learning, to do it well. Second, most teachers have not been taught to academically reflect and thus don’t know where to begin teaching the process with to their own students.