I hope this time of year, with a break from school, provides you with time for rest, reflection, and renewal as a new year begins. This past year has been one of many different experiences for all of us. Reflection is key to gaining learning, insights, and new practices from those experiences. Here are blogs and podcasts from the past year that focus on reflection.

This blog explores how the quarantine and move to distance learning made new learners out of all of us: students, teachers, parents, instructional coaches, and school administrators. It provides questions to be asking ourselves and questions for facilitating and coaching others in reflection. Included is a link to a podcast interview with Aimee Skidmore, a secondary English Teacher at an international school in Geneva, Switzerland, who shares her reflective process to continually improve her teaching with feedback from her students.

“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

– John Dewey

In Promoting Reflection for Educator Learning, I provided samples of questions and paraphrasing to encourage reflection and address the importance of listening. After listening to a podcast from Daniel Pink on Intellectual Humility, I explore its impact on reflection in this blog.

Lastly, I also explored where student reflection fits into the learning process. The question, “When might our students gain more from reflective thinking time about the work that they’ve been doing than doing more work?’ is explored in this podcast.

I look forward to continuing my reflecting, pondering, and learning with you in 2021.