Reflecting on Reflections

Every day, I encourage my students to express their learning in a variety of ways and discuss with them why and how it is beneficial to do so - however I have found myself not always doing this since developing this blog.  In a recent staff meeting we discussed the difference between wondering, pondering, journalling and reflecting - how these are all based around different things - and that reflecting should be based around certain criteria and around our children and their learning.  In class today I was working with a student on Wordle and realised just how well that tool can sum up the main ideas of something simply by how often they are repeated.  I decided to place each of my recent reflective blog posts in Wordle so that I could get a true representation of what it is I am focussing on - with Wordle the words that are repeated the often (and therefore the largest focus in the reflection) are the words that are largest.  I was happily surprised with what I saw and it was a timely reminder that I am on track with my reflections.