Student reflections where students actually reflect...

9pm... night before the start of a new school semester... the 'normal' time for a teacher to decide that he wants to create something for his class for their first day back.  Soon we are to create SMART goals.  First, I figured we needed to review what's been so far.  We needed a brief reflection on Semester One.

It's not glamorous.

It's not ground-breaking.

It's not inspired.

Glamorous... tick.  Ground-breaking... tick.  Inspired... tick.

But.... what I whipped up actually reached the kidlets today.  It got them really thinking.  AND it inspired me to look deeper still for tomorrow.  Something about how I 'accidentally' framed this reflection page, or formatted it, reached the kidlets.  Something about how they responded reached me.  Something a member of my PLN said in a whole staff meeting this afternoon made me realise what I think is the obvious next step.

I'll share here, but please feel free to suggest changes if you see an obvious improvement which I've missed thus far.  I'm totally NOT precious about this stuff. 

Without further ado, the student reflection sheets which I had 4RB fill in as a reflection on their past semester.
Why is the second half bigger?  Because I am still figuring out how to add pictures to blog posts properly.
Interested in the original doc?  Let me know and I'd be more than happy to share.

It is this last one that really got the ball rolling on a magic discussion.

 The kids 'GOT' the format.  It's not genius... it just reached them.  The last area being free choice was the 'eye-opener'.  Obviously, every kid went for what the feel they are 'best' at.  Every kid gave me their best success story, their area of highest confidence.  These were lovely enough as is, but the little icons which they drew were even better.

After Summer Howarth visited our school this afternoon, talking about Middle School kids and how we have to meet them where they are 'at', I realised that my next step has to be another page.  Tomorrow, I will give the kids more of these free choice bars.  I'll chop them so that they can fill in as many as they like in the time I give them.  I'll be asking for each kid to give me 3-5 more free choice reflections on their last semester of learning.  I'll hopefully see the same engagement from the kidlets, and this will open up a world to me of how they feel about what has been, before they embark on making goals for what will be in their future.

There are approx. 5, 875,200 seconds left of Term 3.  (Thanks to timeanddate.com)  I can't wait to get stuck into it with a better idea than ever before about what my 10 yr olds think is important.