When reflection is one of your core values, and you also claim to be a school that wants to be as transparent as possible, every now and then you have to take a risk or two… so tomorrow, during our last period Advisory class, we’re going to attempt a school-wide reflective blogging project. We’re going to ask students (and a lot of us teachers are going to try to do it too) to tackle at least two of the first four questions with everyone taking a stab at the fifth:

1) What talents (new or hidden) have you learned / discovered about yourself this semester?

2) Describe one goal that you set for yourself in September. What steps have you taken? Where and how have you met that goal? Where and how have you fallen short? And how will you proceed toward that goal in the second semester?

3) What are your thoughts about having to do projects in every subject? In what ways are project-type assessments more difficult, interesting, challenging, or meaningful than traditional ways of showing what you know? Cite an example or two to support your answer.

4) Think back to a time over the past semester when you faced a challenge or made a big mistake. (a bad grade on something, letting your benchmarks pile up until the last minute, etc.) What sorts of lessons did you learn about yourself from that challenge and/or mistake? How did this influence the way you did things after that moment? In what ways does this experience help you to plan for next semester?

5) Based on your answers to the questions above, how do you wish to grow / change as a student / person second semester? What steps do you have to take to achieve that growth?

We really are hoping to move kids beyond the kinds of "I need to do my homework" answers where kids give us back what they think we want to hear, but rather, we’re hoping students will take the opportunity to really thinking about the way they think, work and learn. Will everyone? Probably not… but it’s our first chance to ask the students to look — and write about — at the whole of their performance. And this kind of exercise is something that we want to keep coming back to over the course of their career at SLA. How will they look at their meta-cognitive process as 9th graders when they are juniors and seniors? What will happen when they are older and we can share the growth in their answers with incoming students? How will doing a project like this publicly change the way we all think about ourselves and our school?