Effective reflection should involve four steps: Assessment, probing deeper/looking for meaning, planning and review. The act of reflection becomes tremendously powerful when we couple it with the discipline of taking action and checking for results. We will look at each of these steps and offer a set of simple tools to help you improve your reflection practices.

Now, while the memories are hopefully clearer, is the perfect time for you to conduct intentional reflection on this past school year’s performance.  These questions should provide a systematic questioning or assessment of your performance in several key areas. To give you a starting point, four key areas have been pinpointed and several questions to ask yourself are provided. As you answer these questions, be sure to record your observations in a special notebook or computer file for later reference. If you have questions that you feel will serve you better, feel free to replace the ones provided  with your own.  What’s vital is that you answer the questions honestly and as fully as possible.

1. The Big Picture (school year as a whole).
   • What is my overall view on the school year?
   • In what situations did I or did I not really succeeded this year?
   • Have I been more tired  or spread thinner than in the past?
   • Does this fit with my personal mission?
2. Planning/Instruction
   • How was the pacing?
   • What lessons seemed less effective this year than in the past?
   • Am I teaching a specific lesson out of laziness?
   • Are there any students that I am under-serving or having difficulty reaching?
   • How can I make my classroom better serve my students?
3. Relationships
   • How are my relationships with the administration, fellow teachers, students and parents?
   • What could I do to improve these?
   • In what ways could I experience growth in my relationships?
4. Professional Development
   • What would I like to learn to improve as a teacher?
   • What do I need to commit to learn in order to stay relevant?
   • What additional actions could I take to meet my personal mission?

Step two, consists of studying your responses and performing a deeper analysis of these responses. This is done with the intent of finding shared commonalities or previously unidentified connections. In the process of reflection, it’s quite common to identify the surface symptom rather than the less visible core cause. By digging a little deeper, this misdirection can be significantly reduced and allowing for the crafting of solutions that will be more effective. Several questions that will help in this process are provided below.

• How are these successes/problems connected?
• Could this be a result of classroom management?
• Is this connected to scheduling or planning?
• Is this a result of teaching methods?
• Could this be caused by my limited knowledge of a subject?
• Is this a failure of technology?

Following the deeper analysis, it’s time to create a plan of action. With the core causes identified, rank the identified solutions in order of importance. It may help to separate these into three categories based upon urgency. Those needing a short-term response (one month or less), longer-term  attention (greater than one month), and those of questionable importance. From these groups, pick the actions to which you are most committed and determine the logical time necessary for their accomplishment. Use a calendar and set a target date for completion of these actions. Hint: Make sure that you set clearly definable actions as your objectives (i.e. Read The Elegant Universe by August 1^st or create a good writing habits poster by July 17^th). Furthermore, it is very important to select reasonable completion dates.

The fourth and final component of effective reflection is to review your progress. Often goals and deadlines are set but there is no follow-up to see if they were achieved. To minimize this, pick at least one day each month and set half an hour aside to review your progress (try and make it the same day every month). Goals that are met may be crossed off the list, while those that haven’t been achieved will need a little more attention. As you examine these, see if you still believe in their importance. If you still feel that they are vital, go ahead and revise your process or completion date in the manner that makes the greatest sense. Those that no longer maintain relevancy can be dropped. Reviewing your progress on goals not only brings great satisfaction from seeing the progress, it will make you a better educator.

So take an hour or so and put these tools to use before you find yourself saying, “I can’t believe I let another year go by without really reflecting.” There’s no better time than today to reflect on your past year and begin crafting the future.

The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” said the researchers in a paper due out today in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.

Based on later surveys of the same students, researchers found that the culprits typically copied answers from friends, by logging onto a friend’s account on the system to copy work or by getting answers via e-mail or instant message.

For veteran teachers this is hardly a surprising revelation. The complexity of cheating and plagiarism schemes has increased with the rise of technology and ability to transfer information digitally. Cellphones and other devices have made cheating easier than ever, see The Cheating Heart for an overview. Furthermore, despite the education aimed at informing students about copyright and intellectual property, it is clear that generation y and future generations seem to have a different perspective regarding copyright.

While many would point to this as indicating the need for better detection systems, real success comes from successfully encouraging students to choose not to cheat. Restrictive access to technology and more robust detection schemes may seem appealing but lead to students and teachers engaging in a never ending cycle of trying to outsmart one another. This doesn’t mean ignoring cheating or giving it a free pass. In this Web 2.0 world, it does mean, demonstrating a better way and allowing students to make choices. If unethical, according to Professor Pritchard, these choices mean that cheaters will earn the scores they deserve.

In my next article I will outline three keys to building an environment supportive of ethical decision-making. Until then I’d like to hear your comments and observations.

As with any new technology, there are challenges (legal and technical) to its implementation. Additionally, some are more apt to embrace its use while others are more cautious or even try to block them. We will discuss this in depth in future posts. For now, I’ve posted our presentations below. Feel free to use them, we only ask that you attribute them to us.

The new social networking site is designed to help teachers create, organize and share lesson plans. Unlike traditional curriculum sharing websites, BetterLesson incorporates a unique curriculum organizing and filing system that enables teachers to easily create, store, and share information related to lessons they create.

According to BetterLesson, the product enables teachers to

1. organize and share their entire curriculum for a particular course,
2. easily connect and innovate with other educators,
3. tag and search lessons using state standards,
4. access files and instructional content from anywhere in the world,
5. utilize privacy settings to control who can access their curriculum,
6. easily identify high quality curriculum.

One of the interesting design elements of BetterLesson is its cloud computing infrastructure, which enables teachers to easily transfer information from one location to another. This is an exciting idea for teachers, who know firsthand how difficult it can be to easily store, quickly access, and share lesson plans with colleagues.

Another interesting aspect of BetterLesson is its social networking design. This unique design enables teachers to easily share and find high quality curriculum. The problem with many open source curriculum sharing platforms is they can be overwhelming and, often times, ineffective. Busy teachers don’t have time to search for hours to find a helpful lesson. The social networking design of BetterLesson enables teachers to build their own profiles, join groups and networks, and, most importantly, rank the quality of the lessons or curriculum they view. This means teachers can quickly find experienced teachers who design effective lessons and utilize them.

Although BetterLesson has been in private beta, the organization is currently working directly with schools throughout the United States to build curriculum and improve the effectiveness of the site. By summer 2010, BetterLesson hopes to fully launch the product by providing members with access to a content-rich site with first class teacher support.

Check out BetterLesson for yourself and let us know your thoughts.

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According to Bramble,

“Researchers have already enumerated the benefits that kids can get from traditional media. Watching Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues improves children’s problem-solving skills and school readiness. Teaching students how to use word-processing software, Web-design programs, and video-production tools is a proven way of refocusing at-risk teens on school, and, eventually, getting them jobs. Social networks can also pull in students who are otherwise disengaged, because they draw on kids’ often intense interest in finding new ways to communicate with one another.”

Putting aside the potential pitfalls of utilizing social networking tools in a traditional school setting (i.e., privacy issues, inappropriate student behavior, etc.), how can educators effectively do it? Here’s Bramble’s suggestion,

“For starters, students could talk about what they’re doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they’re making connections with one another, and share videos and software they’ve created. Once the conversation gets going, teachers could figure out whether some kids were being left out and find ways to increase those students’ media literacy and bring them into the fold. Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.”

Some of Bramble’s ideas sound good, but his suggestion that teachers should set aside valuable instructional time so students can discuss how they are using applications like Facebook to connect with one another seems very simplistic, to say the least. Simply having kids share the content they created over the weekend, for instance, is certainly not effective in terms of  improving student achievement. If social networking technology is going to be used successfully in the classroom, it must be implemented in a systematic way, in a way that directly and clearly supports academic learning. It’s nice to use social media technology as a way to link curriculum to student prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, let’s say, or as a discussion starter or wrap up to a lesson, but this sort of approach is only marginally beneficial. Considering the potential pitfalls, most teachers are left wondering, “Is using this technology really worth the hassle?”

Bramble also argues teachers should take advantage of our students’ desire to produce things using this technology. Why not have them use it to do something productive? Bramble suggests schools have students

” produce a school-sanctioned video[s]—the re-enactment of a literary or historical scene, for example. This isn’t as simple as a teacher saying, “Why don’t you write a poem about your frustration, rap it on video, and put it on YouTube?” Instead, a teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.”

This sort of approach makes sense. As I noted in a recent post, having students actually “do” something with their learning is a very effective way to utilize social media technology in the classroom. In other words, social media technology provides an easy way to enable students to actually demonstrate their learning. The “doing” part is the last phase of what Curtis Bonk refers to as a learning wheel– read, reflect, display, and do.

Social networking technology certainly has a place in schools. The hard part is finding truly beneficial applications that promote student learning or foster positive communication between members of the school community.

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1. Google Apps for Education– “Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities.” The suite includes apps to help teachers communicate (Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk) and collaborate (Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Groups, and Google Video).

2. Evernote– Evernote is a great tool to save ideas, things you see during the school day, and important information. Teachers and administrators can use this app from their smartphones to create a note on a student or class, clip a web page to look at later, take a photo, grab a screen shot, or save an audio file. Evernote is a wonderful tool that can help busy teachers easily capture important information and quickly organize it. I access Evernote from my smartphone during the school day to organize my thoughts and record important school-related information. When I get a chance to sit down at my desk (and I have a little more time to think),  I access Evernote from my desktop to update and further organize the information I captured with my smartphone.

3. Basecamp– Basecamp is a terrific project management application. Users can easily share files, assign tasks, organize information, and manage deadlines. Basecamp is a wonderful tool for site administrators, department chairs, or site committees.

4. Dimdim– This app enables users to easily screen share. Users can deliver presentations online, share videos, or other types of interactive information. The best part of Dimdim is that it is 100% browser-based and, therefore, doesn’t require instillation or downloading of software. Dimdim is a great way for teachers and administrators to share information, host online meetings, and participate in professional development activities.

5. Mindmeister– Mindmeister is a mind-mapping tool that can help educators design, organize, and share complex ideas. Mindmeister is a great tool to map and design curriculum, organize department strategies, or outline a district policy. Another similar app I use on my smartphone is Thinking Space. Although it’s not quite as good as Mindmeister, I like being able to access the tool on my smartphone while I’m meeting with teachers, sharing ideas, or organizing my thoughts (on the run!).

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Here are three related articles from Inside Learning Technologies magazine:

1. Using Free Public Social Media Tools, October 2009
2. Using Google Tools, November 2009
3. Using Free, Public Social Media Tools, Elgg, January 2010

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