Question

The goals of this discussion are to provide an opportunity for:

• students to reflect upon their strengths and identify areas needing improvement and:
• faculty to recognize where students are struggling with content and address issues as soon as possible.

In this discussion board, please take a moment to reflect on this course from Weeks 1 - 4. The following question prompts may help you in crafting your reflection.

• What’s working well for you in this course?
• Is there anything in this course you feel needs improved or changed?
• What have you learned?
• Are you struggling with content or any area in this course?
• Do the assigned activities (textbooks, readings, media) help to support your learning and completion of discussions and assignments?

Answer 1

When we provide students the time and placefor reflection, we empower them as learnersand thinkers. Reflection on a lesson or on theirown progress also allows them to build skills in critical thinking that they can apply when they are problem-solving and learning on theirown.

The ways to encourage are

• A conference with students individually or in small groups.
• A peer conference.
• A brainstorming session.
• Students writing a reflection about their progress.

Ways to improve student engagement in virtual classrooms

1. Break the ice. ...
2. Foster a community. ...
3. Create individual learning plans. ...
4. Develop curriculum around shorter content. ...
5. Integrate face-to-face virtual interactions. ...
6. Learn by doing. ...
7. Add flexibility into the curriculum. ...
8. Provide opportunities to collaborate.

Most of us go through life viewing our experiences as isolated, unrelated events. We also view these happenings simply as the experiences they are, not as opportunities for learning. Psychologists refer to this type of lifeview as an "episodic grasp of reality" (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman, & Miller, 1980), and it is not a habit we want to pass along to children. Instead, we want students to get into the habit of linking and constructing meaning from their experiences. Such work requires reflection.

Reflection has many facets. For example, reflecting on work enhances its meaning. Reflecting on experiences encourages insight and complex learning. We foster our own growth when we control our learning, so some reflection is best done alone. Reflection is also enhanced, however, when we ponder our learning with others.

Reflection involves linking a current experience to previous learnings (a process called scaffolding). Reflection also involves drawing forth cognitive and emotional information from several sources: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. To reflect, we must act upon and process the information, synthesizing and evaluating the data. In the end, reflecting also means applying what we've learned to contexts beyond the original situations in which we learned something.