Learning to Reflect: A Classroom Experiment.

Abstract

I came to teaching with conflicting notions about how uch thinking I could ask of my students. On one hand, I had my own history as a student: I basically did what I was told. Even when I "thought for myself," I stayed within well-defined borders. On the other hand, I had begun to read about students responding to each other's writing and making suggestions and even judgments about what good writing might look like. My challenge as a new teacher was to leap over several decades without falling in any cracks. I have since learned that many of my teaching colleagues share the same predicament. We are trying to teach students to think in ways that were not part of our experiences as grade school students. What's more, we may be expecting our students to learn to do what we once did for them, that is, to analyze and interpret their learning and their work. Donald Graves (1992) speaks for a fair number of teachers as he describes his early days in the classroom, when teaching his students to reflect was undoubtedly the furthest idea from his mind: