Reflecting on Reflection

Accountability is a loaded word in the world of education. While teacher accountability is often held up as the solution to fixing our education system, we will not deal with holding teachers accountable for their students. Rather, we want to encourage students to take a stake in their own education.

The theme of accountability came up in a number of our interviews with teachers. Across the board, educators see it as a critical skill throughout a student’s education and life. One teacher put a focus on reflection as a means for building accountability. According to her, reflection helps students identify where they went wrong and fosters self-improvement. These observations are consistent with research; there is significant evidence that self reflection is linked to more intrinsic motivation and better academic achievement. A different teacher we spoke with gives students the ability to apportion their time as they see fit. This gives students a basic sense of time management as well as task handling.

For our first prototype, we envision a product that creates opportunities for students to reflect on their own progress. This may take several forms, but in the first iteration it will require that students write down what they believe they could have done better and what went well for each unit of material. We would then share this information with teachers so that they could see what each student thought of their own performance and give feedback on habits and skills. With each new unit, our prototype will automatically deliver back the students’ previous reflections at the appropriate time. This will allow students to look over their past reflections when the teacher sees fit, providing the students with an opportunity to remember past lessons and their desired improvements before diving into a similar task. We believe that students should often be given the opportunity to reflect and focus on making those positive changes.