Reflections

Yesterday was the fifth and final session in this year’s professional learning. You can read about previous sessions here, here, and here. Our focus for the year has been experiential education. As this was our last session, we spent our time examining reflection.

Reflection is a vital part of any educational process. In the case of experiential education, if we have attained our goal, the students have been pushed out of their comfort zone and challenged to see the world in a new way. There is a space that is opened up after such an experience, where the participants are open and present in a way that is not common in their day-to-day life. In that moment, an opportunity presents itself to really cement the learning. Sometimes the experience itself is enough to do this, but by taking a moment to process what has just happened, the learning becomes that much more powerful.

We began our session by talking about why reflection is important -- what a learner gains through reflection. Aside from the benefit to the individual we also talked about how students’ reflections at the end of a lesson allow us to gauge, as educators, what they have understood. In other words, reflection can also be an extremely useful assessment tool. From there the teachers shared times in their lives when they had experienced effective reflection. We use those examples to examine what factors allow for reflection. We also talked about how students’ reflections at the end of a lesson allow us to gauge what they have understood. In other words, it also can be an extremely useful assessment tool. We ended the session by brainstorming different activities and exercises to elicit reflection. I was pleased by the teachers’ enormous creativity as they came up with a long list of ideas for a host of inventive ways to push the students to reflect. We ended by acknowledging the challenge of finding time in our all-too-short Hebrew School days to add one more educational element into the mix. However, we also recognized the importance of this aspect of learning and committed ourselves to incorporating it into future lessons.