QLC 3

Reflection

Depth of reflections

I have noticed that over the past term most of the girls are now reflecting independently and with confidence. Lots of their reflections are deeper and more thoughtful than previously. I think this has really stood out in our weekly reflection posts which have been come more individualised as the girls feel confident to reflect on their goals and set new ones. Prior to this the girls still needed quite a lot of scaffolding and more group based goals whereas now they are thinking of and setting their own goals which are appropriate and SMART.

Assessment on Seesaw

I have begun to post assessment pieces on Seesaw which came with the challenge of getting the girls to reflect too. I tried a few different ways of doing this.

1. adding a photo of a reflection sheet as part of the activity - girls found this very tedious

2. using thinking hats as a scaffold to reflect on our learning - this worked well but was very time consuming

3. using sentence starters 'I am most proud of .... because...' and 'next time I would change..... because...'

I found the sentence starters worked best as they were short and scaffolded. The girls were heavily engaged in adding these sentences as comments on their posts.

Timely reflections

Reflecting in a timely way has proved a bit tricky. I have started to include some 'Seesaw time' as part of our literacy must dos. This could be responding to a parent or teacher comment or adding your own comment to a previous post. I am hoping this will continue the parent engagement with Seesaw if they feel they are having more of a two way conversation with their child.

What's next?

Looking ahead with Seesaw I think next year I would aim to have the girls adding reflective comments earlier to promote reflection but also parent engagement. A few parents asked during learning conferences if the girls even go back and read the comments they make so I think this needs to be built in a few times a week.

I am also wondering wether as a school we need to create an age-appropriate reflection method to be used across the various subjects. During a Spanish lesson my girls completed an assessment piece and I was able to ask them to reflect quickly then and there using our class sentence starters. I wonder if this would be useful for all specialists if they knew what the girls are familiar with? Likewise moving from year to year there would be less 'downtime' teaching how to reflect as the structure would already be there for clusters of year groups.