Ronit Ziv-Kreger focuses on how self-awareness and reflection can help students develop intellectually and personally.

Experiential education is increasingly popular, but according to John Dewey, the American philosopher and education reformer, “We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” Harvard Business School researchers concur. Comparing the learning-by-doing that characterizes experiential learning to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection, they found that “learning from direct experience can be more effective when it is coupled with reflection” (Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano & Staats, 2014). Reflection, in this context, means the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. The researchers found that reflection, which helps students identify both what they did well and where and how they missed the mark, empowers learners to build on their successes and identify and set new goals. It also “builds one’s confidence in the ability to achieve a goal (i.e., self-efficacy), which in turn translates into higher rates of learning.”

Educators have also found that reflection:

Builds ownership of learning: Inviting students to participate actively in setting class norms and assessing what they know, what they need to know and how to bridge the gaps, helps them understand how to be strong learners and why they need to learn what they are learning.

Supports a growth mindset: Reflection guides students to seek solutions to challenges they face along the way, which in turn helps them turn failure and potential disappointment into progress, rather than simply giving up.

Nurtures critical thinking: Supporting students to consider alternative solutions and problem solving strategies develops their critical thinking skills.

Helps learners draw meaning: Reflection helps students build their own meaning by making connections to previous learning, future learning and their own lives. This in turn makes it more likely that they will carry the learning forward. This article presents some ways Jewish educators are using reflection to support deeper learning at different stages of the learning process, namely, in planning for the learning, during the learning journey and at the completion of learning.

In planning for learning, reflection strategies can engage stu- dents in setting norms to nurture learning communities, developing an understanding of what constitutes quality work, and articulating personal visions of themselves as successful learners.

Setting norms to nurture learning communities

Children’s mental health expert Dr. Lawrence Kutner (1991) claims that, “Children learn and remember at least as much from the context of the classroom as from the content of the coursework.” Martin Buber (1949) also suggests that the learning environment shapes the quality of the encounters learners have, which subsequently affects their ability to forge healthy relationship and leadership skills.

Explicitly or implicitly, groups develop behavior norms that guide their interactions with each other and their space. Many teachers devote the first week of learning to building class norms, which often culminates in a class brit.

Some teachers do this by directly asking learners questions such as: What do you need to be successful? What do you need from yourself, from your peers and from your teachers? What, in past experiences, has worked well for you as a learner? What qualities and characteristics will make an environment in which you can work well?

Others engage students in activities and games geared toward uncovering their preferences and sparking insights about what’s important for a learning community. One teacher divides her class into groups, gives each group 25 pieces of macaroni and 25 marshmallows, and tells the groups to silently build the tallest tower – no talking allowed. When they finish, they get a new set of 25 macaroni pieces and 25 marshmallows, and the teacher tells them to do it again, but this time they can talk. After the activity, the teacher asks them to compare the two experiences. Some find the silence easier, since it limits arguments. Others prefer talking about what they are doing. Based on this experience, students reflect on what good communication looks like and what norms they want to guide their communication.

Reflection can also be used to foster specific behaviors such as risk-taking or collaboration. To encourage risk-taking, a teacher can pose a challenging question or puzzle and have multiple students come to the board, present their solutions, and get a cheer from the class. Only after several students have presented their answers does the group discuss strategies for solving the problem. This helps establish a focus on the process of learning through sharing and reflecting on different strategies, mistakes and successes, rather than simply who gets the right answer.

To build skills for collaboration and working in groups, some teachers use an improvisational story game called “Yes, and…” Players sit in a circle and build a story together. Each player adds one sentence beginning with “Yes, and…” that must refer to an element of the previous sentence. The game forces players to attend to the ideas of others, rather than thinking ahead or attempting to control the story, and teaches the value of collective effort and group creativity.

As a culminating reflection activity, students can work to create and commit to a class brit that is concise (no more than seven items), kid-friendly, and applicable to all members of the classroom community. The brit should focus on character middot rather than behavioral rules, for example, Hesed/caring, Ometz/courage, Ahrayut/responsibility, and kavod /respect, rather than “No running in the hallways” or, ”No improper uniforms.” Students explore the middot to identify specific behaviors and evidence of what they look like: We show Ometz/courage by standing up for our classmates when they are being treated badly, and by taking the risk to ask questions and share our mistakes to help learning.

Hanging the brit poster in the classroom is an important step, but for the brit to have lasting effect on the learning culture, students and teachers must use it regularly to guide and reflect upon their interactions and behavior. Asking students to identify behaviors that exemplify the norms, consider which of the norms and middot come easily or are challenging for them, and figure out what step they can take to address their challenges can help build an effective learning community.

Developing criteria for quality work

For students to produce quality work, they must know what it looks like and how to achieve it. Teachers can simply tell students about quality work, but reflection can produce higher understanding, engagement and investment. Before beginning a project, teacher and students can examine models of high-quality work done by previous students, the teacher, and even professionals in order to consider what process led to such high quality. For example, students who will be writing a devar Torah might identify criteria for an interesting and meaningful devar Torah by examining a set of divrei Torah crafted by past students, their teacher, and local rabbis. Teachers can push student analysis by asking questions like how revision might have been part of the process. The teacher can then use the criteria the students come up with to help develop the actual criteria used to assess their work.

Creating a vision for success

When students create visions for who they will be at the end of a unit, chart maps for success and track their progress, it can transform their learning experience. This is one of my favorite strategies for reflective preparation.

One way to do this is by having students write letters to their teacher. Conductor Benjamin Zander (2002) begins learning by telling his students that their grade is an A. He then asks them to write him a letter that begins: “I got my ‘A’ because…” In the letters, students describe who they became and how they got there. Zander says, “The person I teach is the person described in the letter.” A teacher who was having a challenging time engaging teens with tefillah found that when her students wrote her this kind of letter, it affected how and what she taught, and the class experience was significantly better for her and her students.

Reflection during the learning

During learning, reflection can help students foster a growth mindset, generate alternative solutions and strategies, track progress with goals and identify gaps, and make meaning and foster connections.

Fostering a growth mindset

A growth mindset is the understanding that each person can grow their intelligence and skills. In contrast, a fixed mindset is the (mistaken) belief that intelligence and abilities are fixed. While we all have different starting places, Dr. Carol Dweck’s (2007) research has shown that a growth mindset has strong positive ramifications for student motivation and learning, and for school success. When teachers and students focus on improvement rather than on how smart students are, students learn much more.

A growth mindset helps students orient themselves towards learning rather than posturing to look smart. Students with a growth mindset value effort; when they are working on something challenging, they say they feel smart. They understand that mistakes and setbacks are a natural part of learning, so they capitalize on their mistakes, rather than worrying about how mistakes might reflect poorly on their abilities. However, students with a fixed mindset think that someone smart doesn’t need to exert effort; they feel anxious when working on something hard. This fixed mindset is destructive to learning.

To nurture a growth mindset, students and teachers can keep Mindset Journals, in which they respond to prompts such as:

• Important mistakes I made this week are…
• Useful feedback I received recently is…
• A time when I was smart in the way I approached a task was when…. And it paid off by…
• My persistent effort with … helped me find success with … because…
• By watching … I’ve learned the following about working smart…
• A time this week when I assumed responsibility for myself and felt good about it was when….
• This is what I saw or heard regarding how … turned failure or discouragement into success….

Such journaling can help students see that although setbacks are inevitable, they do not need to be defined as “failures” or “mistakes.” Instead, reflective students discover that they can gather personal insight and learn from all their experiences. When we help our students learn from these setbacks, we help them build resilience and “grit.”

Generating alternative solutions and strategies

Students, like adults, often get frustrated when they face a setback or hit a hurdle in solving a problem. Some students trash drafts that don’t meet their expectations, or try again using the same unsuccessful strategy. But when students practice reflection, they come to recognize frustration as a signal to pause and think, rather than plow ahead or quit trying. Such pauses, during which students can generate alternative solutions and strategies, not only help them move forward but build critical thinking.

A game called “Back to Back, Face to Face” supports students in generating alternative strategies. Students stand back to back in pairs. The teacher asks a question or poses a problem, gives everyone time to consider an answer or solution, then says “face to face,” and students turn around and take turns sharing their ideas. When they are done sharing, the teacher says “back to back,” students find a new partner, and the teacher poses a new question or challenge (or poses the old one again, if students need more time to reflect on it). This game offers students a playful way to articulate their ideas and hear alternative ideas from their peers.

Reflective journals are another place where students can generate and develop their ideas and positions.

Tracking progress with goals and identifying gaps

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile’s (2011) research on what makes people creative, productive, happy and motivated at work reveals that the single most important thing that boosts emotions, motivation and perceptions during a workday is making progress in meaningful work. “The Progress Principle” holds that the more frequently people experience that sense of everyday progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.

Teachers can have students track their progress toward learning targets. Some teachers even make special tracker journals. For each learning target, students note their progress and generate ideas for moving forward. Students can periodically reread their journals to compare what they knew at the beginning of a learning sequence with what they know as they move forward.

The support of peers and reflecting on the work of peers can also help students make progress. An important strategy for identifying learning gaps and improving the quality of student work is getting feedback from others. Formal critique sessions give students the opportunity to learn from each other’s work and feedback in a structured, safe context. Early in the year, teachers can introduce the rules for critique and build the expectation that critique improves work by having students practice offering critique on a simple assignment. Ron Berger (2013), Chief Academic Officer of EL Education, has three rules for critique: “Be kind; be specific; be helpful.” Protocols can help keep critique sessions on target.

Critique sessions can also become lessons in their own right, because they provide the opportunity for teachers to introduce concepts and skills at a point when students are eager to learn them, having just received feedback about their work.

Making meaning and fostering connections

When young children first learn to reflect on their work, teachers use simple prompts about the work to get them thinking: Do you like what you made? What is good about your work? As students get older, reflection can also focus on the process: What did you learn from this assignment? This next level is reflection for self-improvement, which is also known as metacognitive reflection.

Teachers can facilitate this type of reflection through questions like:

• What step could you take to make this work even better?
• What part of the work do you find most meaningful? Why?
• What does this piece reveal about you as a learner?
• What did you learn about yourself as you worked on this piece?
• Have your ideas on this subject changed?
• Where are you vis-a-vis your goals? Where would you like to be? What’s getting in the way? What piece of advice do you have for yourself?
• What is one thing you particularly want people to notice when they look at your work?
• If someone else were looking at the piece, what might they learn about the topic? What might they learn about who you are?

Some of these questions can be asked during the learning process but this type of metacognitive reflection can also be powerful at the end of a learning unit (see next section).

Dewey suggested that art affords a means for unifying individual parts of an experience, as opposed to letting them “merely succeed one another.” Combining art with other forms of reflection, such as written and oral, provides many students with a powerful means to more fully synthesize, express and understand their experience.

Artist and Combined Jewish Philanthropy consultant, Tova Speter (2016), guides participants to delve into Judaic texts through art-making. For example, in studying Jacob’s dream, she invites each learner to doodle imagery inspired by the text while learning and then to create two small paintings: one of their visual interpretation of Jacob’s experience upon waking from his dream and another of what it might look like when they themselves feel awe-inspired or spiritually connected.

Small groups of learners (6-12) then display their pairs of paintings for each other. Each learner selects a pair of someone else’s paintings and considers which might reflect Jacob’s experience and which the painter’s. Learners then take turns sharing their observations about the paintings they selected, following a protocol in which they (1) describe what they see in each of the paintings, (2) identify how they think the art might connect to the text, and (3) share a question beginning with “I wonder…” The artist then responds and continues the process. This framework facilitates a beautiful conversation about meaning, and draws out creative reflection and personal connections with the text.

Reflection at the completion of learning

When students complete a learning journey, reflecting on the significance of what they learned is vital to helping them see the relevance of the learning. A fitting strategy at this stage is discussions. Students can discuss problem-solving strategies, and teachers can guide them to consider what they learned and why it was important. During these rich discussions, students learn how to listen to and explore the implications of each other’s strategies and priorities. Such listening also builds empathy, flexibility, and persistence, while reflection on the learning process as a whole builds critical thinking skills.

Some teachers employ a reflection activity that incorporates recognition of various achievements – academic, derekh eretz (character and moral), and habits of work — by using formats such as: “I know that I’m (…) because I was able to (…)” and “I know that you’re (…) because you were able to (…)” Such reflection activities support students not only to recognize that they succeeded but to notice and articulate what led to their success. Some schools build on such reflection and motivate it by asking students to play a leadership role in selecting and presenting their work at student led conferences. A “progress report” is not just given to students but is something they participate in creating.

Conclusion

Col. Eric Kail (2012), the course director of military leadership at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, writes in a recent Washington Post article:

Reflection requires a type of introspection that goes beyond merely thinking, talking or complaining about our experiences. It is an effort to understand how the events of our life shape the way in which we see the world, ourselves and others. And it is essential for any leader. Reflection is what links our performance to our potential. It is the process of properly unpacking ourselves as leaders for the good of others.

The notion of “properly unpacking ourselves as leaders for the good of others” aligns with a central Jewish spiritual practice. In Hebrew, the verb to pray, lehitpallel, comes from the verb pallel, “to judge, sort, argue.” It is a reflexive verb, which also means “to judge oneself, or to argue with oneself.” Thus, the thrice-daily time of Jewish prayer is a time of self judgment and self-reflection. When a person addresses G‑d and prays for blessings, the Hebrew language for what they are doing implies that the spiritual avodah/ worship involves reflecting on one’s behavior, and doing so with the honesty called for in the presence of the Almighty. By incorporating reflection into Jewish education, then, we are not only improving student learning, but helping learners build important Jewish spiritual “muscles” that will serve them throughout their lives.

References

Amabile, T., Kramer, S. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press.

Berger, R., (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Buber, M. (1949) Paths in utopia. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, London: Routledge; Boston: Beacon Press; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G., and Staats, B. (2014). Learning by thinking: How reflection improves performance, in Harvard Business School Working Paper Number: 14-093

Dweck, C., (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books.

Kail, E., (2012, March 9). Leadership character: The role of reflection. Washington Post.

Kutner, L., (1991). Parent & child: Getting through to each other. William Morrow & Co.

Speter, T. & Richman, H. (2016). Not just another painted Tzedakah Box… www. jewishboston.com/not-just-another-painted-tzedakah-box/

Zander, B., (2002). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. Penguin Books.

Ronit Ziv-Kreger has supported dozens of schools in Israel and Boston with implementation of innovative pedagogies such as project based learning (PBL), Torah Godly Play, blended learning and digital badging. Dr. Ziv-Kreger serves as consultant to CJP’s initiative to reinvent supplementary education in Boston and is Designer and Trainer for Hebrew College’s congregational PBL professional development.