Learning Topic 8.A.1

When I first started thinking about this, I thought that I don't really incorporate a lot of student reflection into a  lesson, but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do more than I thought.  When we work in the classroom, I will record the students playing or singing and have them listen to and evaluate how they think they've done and see if they can identify any key problems or positives.  When we do our composition projects we do a lot of listening and evaluating and identifying, then moving to say what needs to be changed, removed or stay the same.

I think that reflection is always a good thing.  It requires students and teachers alike to really look at what worked, what didn't and what would be more effective.  So often, we complete a project and then we are ready to just move on to the next thing, without taking the time to realize that lessons learned can be applied either elsewhere or to the same activity down the road.

When asking students to reflect I would have them ask themselves these questions:

• What did I do that worked really well?
• What could be changed to make it better?
• Is there anything that shouldn't be there/isn't relevant to the subject?
• What was my initial reaction to this piece/performance/project and why?

Reflection doesn't always have to be in written form.  I find that discussion among groups is good as it allows for other perspectives other than our own.  Many times an outside perspective offers very valuable input.  reflection could even take the form of visual art.  For instance, how would this piece look if it were a picture?

Reflection gives all of us an opportunity to open up our minds to delve deeper into how we are really doing and how we can be even more effective at what we are doing, even when we are doing things really well.  There is never any shame in deciding that something should be omitted or changed.  I think that reflection is a great way to open up a door into letting students and teachers know that it is ok to know that we are doing things really well, but there could be something there to make us even better.