Candace Byrne
cbyrne@shastacollege.edu
Flex Day Spring 2010: GIFTS Workshop
Self-reflection Exercise
Rationale
Asking learners to reflect on writing assignments they have completed serves two
purposes: (1) it encourages learners to acquire reflective habits of mind essential for doing good
work and improving their work over time, and (2) it allows teachers to connect with learners’
judgments about their own process and product and to respond to that judgment. Some classroom
structures continually move on to the next topic, the next activity, the next outcomes. Deliberate
pauses to allow for reflection make learners more conscious of where they falter and where they
achieve: it highlights learning as an ongoing problem-solving activity.
From the teacher’s point of view, learner self-reflections also have value. Reading
learners’ reflections provides teachers with information we would not otherwise have. Their
reflections often surprise and engage us. They connect us with individual learning processes.
They offer us opportunities to target these individual concerns and achievements.
This particular, simple self-reflection is one learners use at the completion of each formal
writing assignment. Because its form remains substantially the same through four or five
iterations (to accompany the four or five major writing assignments in the semester), learners
come to anticipate writing the responses. The substance of the questions helps learners
internalize that writing, no matter how experienced or accomplished the writer, will most likely
present trouble spots and proud spots and that it is rewarding to weather the trouble and arrive at
the pride.
Materials:
Paper and writing instrument
Paperclip
Description:
Learners complete a deliberate process to produce a piece of writing. This process
includes the following directed, recursive steps:
 prewriting through a variety of exercises to capture ideas and detail that might be
used in the writing
 focusing to arrive at a central purpose and point for the piece of writing
 organizing the information in the writing
 drafting the writing
 receiving feedback on the substance of the writing
 revising both to respond to substantive feedback and to edit and polish
On the day that the writing is due, learners reflect on the following questions about their
writing process and respond to them:
 What gave you the most trouble? What was easiest?
 Which aspects of the finished paper are you most proud of and which are you
least proud of?
 What questions do you have about this paper that you’d particularly like your
teacher to address?
They then attach the reflection to their materials as they hand them in.
Candace Byrne
cbyrne@shastacollege.edu
Flex Day Spring 2010: GIFTS Workshop
Processing:
Because learners’ reflections are attached to the top of the packet they hand in, I read
these first. This allows me to read their work purposefully, attending to what they have written,
acknowledging trouble spots and helping troubleshoot them, affirming successes, allaying
doubts, and redirecting attention when necessary. My feedback is more valued because it
addresses what they have articulated.
As the assignments develop through the semester, I make various alterations to the
middle questions, targeting them on specific aspects of writing we have centered on in the
feedback process. For example, on an assignment when we pay a good deal of attention to
structure/organization, the middle question might read “Which aspects of the essay’s
organization are you most proud of and which are you least proud of?”
When I return their assignment packets to them, their reflections with my comments
again lie on the top of the packet so that they read these first. As I comment on the work within
the packet, I also include references to what they say in their self-evaluations.