What it is

In reflecting, students think about what they have learned, how they have learned, what they feel about the learning. They draw conclusions about their own learning processes and the value of their learning.

Reflecting involves understanding one’s own personal capacities and processes and fosters a problem exploring disposition; this encourages student curiosity leading to a recursive process of experimentation in the belief that there can be more than one possible solution.

Why it is important

Reflecting on one’s own learning process develops a student’s capacity of learning how to learn, a foundation for living and working. Knowing how one responds to verbal and visual texts and why one does so in particular ways is an important skill for an engaged and critical citizenry.

Through reflecting a student can develop knowledge of their own learning style and the development of a range of learning skills such as collaborative skills, independent investigation, monitoring one’s own progress or evaluating one’s own learning. 

Stage 6

Students evaluate their own and others’ ways of responding to and composing texts and understand that meaning making results from particular world views and the adoption of different processes of response, composition and learning.

Stage 5

Students broaden their understanding and use of metacognitive processes to choose and develop certain strategies appropriate for particular situations. They extend their range of reflective practices to consider how their own context influences the ways they respond, compose and learn.

Stage 4

Students begin to personalise their metacognitive processes, identifying their own pleasures and difficulties in responding, composing and learning. They are able to plan and monitor their work, articulate their own learning processes and begin to assess which learning processes may suit them and will suit particular tasks and why.

Stage 3

Students identify, use and discuss text processing strategies and assess the development of their own skills against agreed criteria. They consider strategies for collaborating with their peers and reflect on their learning achievements.

Stage 2

Students are aware of processes of composition and can use this understanding to develop criteria for judgement of their own texts and those of their peers. They appraise their own work in order to refine its effectiveness and correct errors. They also consider their preferences in reading and learning.

Stage 1

Students become aware that their own experiences and preferences shape their compositions and their responses to text. They articulate some approaches to responding, composing and assessing texts and ways to learn.

ES1

As students are learning to read, write and interact with adults and their peers, they are made aware of their learning processes. How to learn is made as important to them as what to learn as they develop strategies for reading, writing, speaking and listening individually and in groups