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Reflective teachers help students understand that the students will now look back rather than move forward. They will take a break from what they have been doing, step away from their work, and ask themselves, "What have I (or we) learned from doing this activity?"

The teacher helps each student monitor individual progress, construct meaning from the content learned and from the process of learning it,

Teachers who promote reflective classrooms ensure that students are fully engaged in the process of making meaning.

in written and oral form

To be reflective means to mentally wander through where we have been and to try to make some sense out of it.

and journals

Habits of Mind

ask students to reread their journals, comparing what they knew at the beginning of a learning sequence with what they know now. Ask them to select significant learnings, envision how they could apply these learnings to future situations

the quality of students' reflections changes as children develop their reading and writing skills. When kindergartners were asked to reflect orally, they gave rich descriptions of their work. But as they developed their writing ability and were encouraged to write their own reflections, the reflections became less descriptive. This change puzzled the teachers until they realized that students are more concerned about spelling, punctuation, and other aspects of editing when they first learn to write. Because students do not have a great deal of fluency with their writing, they are more limited in what they describe. In contrast, when meeting with the teacher, the kindergartners elaborated on what they wrote about their work. And once students became more fluent with their writing skills, they were able to represent their reflective thoughts more easily.

stereotypical comments such as "This was fun!" or "I chose this piece of work because it is my best." Teachers realized that they needed to spend time teaching students how to reflect. They asked students, "What does a reflection look like when it really tells you something about the experience?"

Reflection was not a time for testimonials about how good or bad the experience was. Instead, reflection was the time to consider what was learned from the experience.

Students might collect work throughout the year as part of a portfolio process. Every quarter they can review the work in their collection folders and choose one or two pieces to enter into their portfolio. When they make those choices, they can take the opportunity to reflect on the reasons for their choices and to set goals for their next quarter's work.

superficial to in-depth reflections. Indicators of in-depth reflections include making specific reference to the learning event, providing examples and elaboration, making connections to other learning, and discussing modifications based on insights from this experience.

What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting

our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate

Evidence supports teaching both formats of handwriting and then letting each student choose which works best for him or her

So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade

They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly

While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.

The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice

freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write

for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages

the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.

There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.

even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.

that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning

How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?

Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.

the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.

it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead

There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?

Ask yourself what they need to get on in life, the bare minimum (like filling in a job application), and concentrate on that.

telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar

I would often ask them to describe operations that they take for granted. Ask a girl to write a paragraph on how she braids her sister’s hair. Ask a boy to explain a sports rule. These are just basic starting points, where students learn to write on paper what they might tell a friend. It keeps it concrete. If you ask a kid to write on “My Favorite Movie,” you’re opening the door to subjectivity, and hence to a flood of clichés

See, then say

A good reader digging into a good book is wonderful. Musical

Reading good fiction is like making the jump from masturbation to sex

Good teachers can be trained, if they really want to learn (some are pretty lazy). Great teachers, like Socrates, are born

What about teaching? Craft, or art?King: It’s both. The best teachers are artists