View Content #28108

The purpose of this activity is to guide educators in developing a practical reflection tool that can be used in modeling and supporting the development of critical evaluative and reflective skills within learners. These skills support a learner-centered classroom.

Learning Objectives:

Teachers will be able to:

• Draft a handout that guides self-evaluation and reflection and/or peer review.

Modes: Any

Materials: Formative or summative assessment(s) and related evaluation criteria

Procedure:

1. Examine an assessment (formative or summative), a series of related assessments (formative or summative), and the evaluation criteria for those assessments. Identify critical skills and characteristics that are indicated by the evaluation criteria (e.g., organized presentation of ideas, use of cohesive and/or rhetorical devices, the ability to repair miscommunication).

2. Create a list of those skills. Some example lists are provided below.

Presentational Mode

• Has a clear purpose/objective
• Uses effective transitions
• Has clearly developed ideas
• Has clearly supported ideas
• Organizes ideas in an effective manner
• Employs an appropriate tone and register throughout
• Structural features are appropriate to genre
• Uses varied and engaging language

 Interpretive Mode

• Articulates main ideas
• Identifies supporting details
• Uses genre-specific cues to predict meaning
• Uses contextual cues to predict meaning
• Comprehends pronoun usage
• Provides evidence to support conclusions
• Corretly interprets implicature

  Interpersonal Mode

• Communicates ideas
• Demonstrates awareness of breakdowns in communication
• Repairs misunderstandings
• Uses gesture and/or images to appropriately emphasize and communicate ideas
• Handles unexpected complications
• Actively negotiates meaning
• Pronunciation and/or written emphasis contribute to meaning making

3. Use your list to create a guide to direct learners in their own self-evaluation and/or peer  review.  Provide space for them to identify their strengths, provide evidence of their strengths, and to provide one goal for improvement. An example guide is included here.

4. Identify specific times within your upcoming lessons to model the skills you identified in Step 2. Provide learners time to evaluate examples as you model so that they understand what the skills look like in practice.

Notes:

The lists indicated in Step 2 are agnostic of proficiency level. Teachers may want to adapt these lists to their specific contexts. For example, teachers of novice learners may indicate that the ideas communicated and interpreted are familiar and/or practiced and may omit skills related to adapting to unexpected complications.