photo © 2009 Karola Riegler | more info (via: Wylio)

My brain hurts.

With two three-hour classes plus office hours plus chats with students plus lectures to attend, Mondays are marathon days. And as one of my classes is new this term, and both of my classes engage students in reflective blogging that’s worth reading, the weekend leading up to class are jam-packed as well. And it’s that time on the calendar for articles to be due and student teachers to be visited. All interesting stuff, but just a whole lot of, uh, “all.”

Yup, my brain hurts. Not in a bad way. My brain is chock full of ideas and questions these days. I have my winter classes blog both to reflect on class and to reflect on their readings. I find that it makes them far better prepared for class, but more importantly, it requires that they stop and think about what it all means. My student teachers follow the School of Education practice of weekly journaling. Together, it creates a symphony as these students ask themselves how do the pieces fit together? What are the implications? Or, in very blunt terms, SO WHAT?

That’s good learning, I think to myself as I watch the words unfold and reveal how they are growing and connecting. Look how they comment on each other’s work, filling in missing pieces or offering different viewpoints. They are doing some very fine work. Awe-inspiring, in many cases.

But the irony is … I haven’t been taking much time for my own reflection. And so my million little ideas are whizzing like steel balls in a vintage arcade machine, banging into each other and into the flippers, but they haven’t hit the target or earned me a high score. I’m acutely aware that I’m flooded with input without having the time to arrange that input into meaningful patterns.

Research tells us (see: Donovan & Bransford’s How People Learn or Darling-Hammond’s Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding as examples) that my state is not unique; rather, reflection is undeniably essential to making new learning stick. Whether you call it metacognition, reflection, or thinking about our thinking, new learning requires that we reflect. Most of the K-12 research models, among them Stripling’s Inquiry Model and the Big6, conclude with reflection about the process, product, and next steps.

In my more maudlin moments, I joke that the Big6 often becomes the GoodEnough5. So often, tight schedules and overpacked curricula provoke teachers and students alike to, just as I have been doing, push reflection aside and just move onto the next project. And so the takeaways just dangle in mid-air, waiting to be grasped and filed away for future use.

So, colleagues, what are you doing to promote reflective practice both among our students and with one another?

This is the last “Nudging” request of the season. You can help me make room for reflection time if you help me out with this, mm-kay? Please. Or my brain just might explode. Friends don’t let friends’ heads explode.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Nudging Toward Inquiry, Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.