The Art of Reflection

As many of you have begun to try new and creative ways to engage your students with your curriculum by using technology, I wanted to offer encouragement. There will be times when lessons fail: because the technology doesn’t work, because the lesson wasn’t completely thought out, because the idea was good, but the execution left something to be desired. Whatever the case may be, when you are being creative and takings risks, failure will happen. Robert F. Kennedy said “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly”. He wasn’t saying we should embrace failure, rather embrace the purpose of failure, which is to learn from it.

I came across a three part article written by Michal Eynon-Lynch, the second of which is titled, “Failing Toward Success”. In this article, she address how as educators, we should respond to students work, especially when they do not reach the standard set. However, I also think the article relates to how we should respond to our own teaching methods and lessons when we face failure.

Sometimes we have a “that lesson didn’t pan out”. If we stop there, we have not learned from our failure, we simply had a failure. But, if we take that statement one step further, “that lesson didn’t pan out; what would I do differently next time?”, we grow as educators and our lessons become more effective.

After we have completed a lesson, project, or activity with our students, we should reflect and ask ourselves “what worked, what didn’t work, what do I need to change to make a better lesson”. This reflection allows us to develop more relevant and engaging lessons. We should allow our students the same opportunity. As teachers, we feel so pressured to get through all of the material that we just take the grades we get and move on. But, wouldn't the students be better served if we allowed them and ourselves the opportunity to reflect on what they did correctly and what they did incorrectly? Would that increase the quality of their work?

I highly encourage you to read “Failing Toward Success” and the third article, “Guiding the Aftermath of Failure”. The articles have excellent suggestions for increasing student work ethic; because the only real failure is when we refuse to reflect and grow.

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