I checked a 4th grade lesson board, entered that day’s objective into Mirror, and one minute later I had students reflecting and getting targeted feedback.

Jennifer Rodabaugh | Claxton Elementary

USE CASE

Reflection for students and teachers

Jennifer Rodabaugh

Instructional Coach

School/District:

Claxton Elementary/Anderson School District

Grade Level 4th

Before Claxton Elementary started using Mirror, teachers relied on writing assignments as the primary format for collecting student reflections. A few teachers were even bold enough to try video. But, with each of these methods, teachers struggled to identify students’ underlying needs and students experienced long delays between finishing the reflection and receiving feedback.

Claxton teachers needed a solution that helped them understand student learning gaps in more depth and helped cement authentic and timely feedback loops. After vetting several solutions, they chose Mirror.

AI that works for you

Jennifer Rodabaugh is an instructional coach at Claxton Elementary. She embraces her teachers using AI. One of her 4th grade teachers was using ChatGPT to develop written reflective prompts for students but it wasn’t the best fit. It was time-consuming and laborious to develop prompts that were grade-level appropriate and standards-based.While looking for other solutions, they signed up for Mirror’s demo program. Mirror demonstrated how AI would work for them to uncover gaps in student understanding with minimal lift or prep from teachers. With Mirror, Jennifer and the 4th grade teacher effectively generated reflective prompts in under 2 minutes, a task that previously took them 1.5 hours using ChatGPT. “One minute I entered a 4th grade class, I checked the board for that day’s objective, I entered that objective into Mirror and a minute later, I had students reflecting and getting feedback,” Jennifer recounted.

Faster feedback, never generic

The ability to generate reflective prompts quickly and easily was huge for Jennifer and her teachers, but that’s not all that Mirror’s AI can streamline.

Teachers lament grading written and video reflections. It is a time-consuming process, and teachers can’t immediately provide feedback and positive reinforcement to their students. It is in the moments right after an activity ends when students are most unsure of how they did or what they can do to improve in the future. 

Jennifer says, “With this technology, teachers can teach one group and have students reflect with Mirror in other small groups simultaneously, which enables students to get that immediate feedback that teachers typically don’t have time to give in the moment.” Mirror ensures that each feedback is personalized to each student, is relevant to the activity objective, and offers strategies to the student on how to improve their reflective skills.

Helping teachers uncover hidden learning gaps

But Mirror’s feedback loop doesn’t end when a student is finished reflecting at the device. Mirror’s AI technology works behind the scenes analyzing the responses and assessing various academic and social-emotional insights, such as mindset, sentiment, and understanding of the objective. Then Mirror’s analysis is posted directly to the teacher’s dashboard within 1 minute. Mirror uncovers hidden learning gaps which led Claxton teachers to realize that students were struggling with concepts they thought students understood. Jennifer says Mirror has been a “game-changer” for Claxton teachers and their students and they’ve only had it for one month. 

Try Mirror, commitment-free, with your students

Do you struggle to deliver timely feedback to students and feel like you’re always one step behind in understanding what they need to be successful? Spend more time building relationships with students and less time in red ink. Try Mirror with students in your class for free today!

The post Immediate feedback for every student, after every lesson appeared first on Swivl.

Wendy Miller has spent nearly 30 teaching Special Education, so she knows a thing or two about differentiating support for her learners. Enter Wendy’s classroom and you’ll find a vast wonderland of multi-modal interactive tools to offer engagement and stimulation. She has robotics, lego systems, and sensory stations galore. What she didn’t have was a way for her students to reflect on their learning in a format that was comfortable for them and scalable for her. That is until she had them reflect with Mirror.

In the past, student reflection in Wendy’s classroom was something only possible to observe on the spot – during verbal, one-on-one conversations with each of her 12 students. However, this method had significant limitations, especially for her students with autism. These students’ interpersonal dialogue is often mired by their extreme anxiety or challenging articulation. While Wendy has built a strong rapport with each of her students with autism, it was almost impossible for her to immediately spot each student’s specific learning gaps.

A verbal reflection tool 

When Wendy was first introduced to Mirror by Swivl, she thought it could be a viable solution to alleviate pressure for her students to communicate, but she couldn’t imagine the impact it would have within her classroom.

Mirror has enabled her students with autism to be more open and expansive than ever before about what they’re learning.

“I hear much better language samples when they use Mirror than when we talk face-to-face, which has been so powerful. Even my students with the most challenging articulation, Mirror seemed to know what they were saying. I was so impressed because most people cannot even understand what the child is trying to say, and here’s a solution that not only understands what they’re saying, it is also helping me identify learning gaps.”

Time-saving insights 

Wendy’s students, on average, spend two minutes at Mirror reflecting on a lesson. Mirror’s AI then synthesizes the student’s response for understanding, mindset, and social-emotional wellness, saving Wendy up to 20 minutes per day, per student. These instantaneous insights are helping Wendy streamline time spent tracking longer-range goals so she can instead focus on sustaining the core relationships she has built with each student.

“I work with my students for three or four years before they move on so I really get to see how they can grow and change, but these reflections give me more specific data to address their IEP goals and define the next step in their communication and their interactions for their social-emotional learning goals as well.”

Elevating student feedback 

For Wendy, Mirror is the ultimate integration of social emotional learning, academics, and technology. Now she relies on Mirror to elicit higher quality reflections from her students and the data that Mirror extracts from each reflection reveals the hidden lessons they are really experiencing in her class. And for the first time, she has been able to provide her students with the kind of specific and individualized feedback that every learner – on the autism spectrum or not – deserves.

“Normally we just say ‘good job,’ and we move on but can’t go much deeper than that. With the data and feedback that Mirror’s dashboard provides, I can help them improve their grammar, use of adjectives, and level of detail in their responses. It’s been so powerful to really help each child improve their speech.”

Try Mirror, commitment-free, with your students

Interested in finding out what hidden lessons your students are experiencing in your class? You can sign up to demo Mirror for 30-days, free.

The post Mirror helps students with autism reflect for the first time appeared first on Swivl.

¡Mirror ahora admite estudiantes de inglés que hablan español! (Mirror now supports Spanish speaking English language learners!) In our constant pursuit to make reflection a priority for every learner and every classroom activity, this week’s release expands our commitment toward transparency and inclusivity – and not just for students. In addition to Spanish support, we’ve created a more immediate path to notifying teachers when student reflections contain dangerous or harmful speech and also improved how adults reflect with Mirror.

Spanish support for reflections

Mirror helps build the reflective skills of every student, regardless of age, ability, and language barrier. This week’s focus on the language barrier supports native Spanish speakers (more languages will be coming soon!) delivering prompts generated in Spanish and encouraging feedback provided in Spanish as well, instantly surfacing feel-good advice for students on their thinking and ways to improve for next time.

We’ve heard from so many users in our demo program about the need to emphasize reflection with their ELLs. While many students struggle with expressing their thoughts about their learning, this is especially true for non-native speakers who struggle forming connections with teachers and classmates due to their language barrier. One Principal in Tennessee told us:

“ELL support is huge for us. We have 5th grade ELLs who are completely new to the country and our school. Getting them to reflect on their experiences with Mirror is an excellent opportunity to get them speaking in general and we’re able to gain lots of insights of where they need the most academic support.”

Promoting safety

We recently emphasized that reflection is the key to learning and that in order for students to be successful with it, they need to integrate learning and social-emotional development. Sometimes when students are asked about their feelings – and they aren’t limited by social pressure they might feel with another student or adult – it may open them up to discussing traumatic experiences. That’s why with our latest update, you’ll receive an email alert the moment a student has shared any dangerous or harmful information so you can take swift steps to support them when they need you most. 

Adults are reflective learners too

Reflection is not just a powerful tool for students and whether you’re in a higher-ed environment, professional learning community, or you’re just trying to find ways to improve classroom instruction, reflection can be the key to understanding your own blindspots and misconceptions about your approaches. And like last week when we made improvements to grade level appropriateness for assessing student reflections, with the new Adult group type, personal reflection and feedback will now be more age appropriate for people like you, too! Additionally, the changes bring more authentic participation to reflection communities you build with colleagues; you can reflect in the group while still maintaining autonomy to set up prompts that are unique to your reflective journey.

¿Listo para empezar?/Ready to get started?

Join the Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: April 29, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

End of year reflections are often used by teachers after the testing season winds down and everyone needs a little time to decompress. But it still takes class time to implement it with pen and paper (or digital form!) and the results are often treated like an exit ticket, rather than a thoughtful and insightful measure of learning that took place throughout a year. And more often than not, this data ends up living in a gradebook or a folder, but rarely is it used to help shape a student’s future.

We think end of year reflections with Mirror can motivate students to set better goals, improve their empathy for each other, and more strongly measure a teacher’s impact than other assessment tools. In about one minute per student using Mirror’s AI, teachers are able to identify gaps and opportunities in their student’s abilities and are shown insights into their sentiment, objective understanding, and mental transformations. 

So if you think you don’t have time before the year ends to collect this kind of data from reflection alone –  think, think, and THINK again, because Mirror makes it possible.

1. Set goals and improve resilience

Reflection is a surefire way to get students thinking realistically about their goals for next year and set their own plans into motion to tackle challenges they faced this year. And as their teacher who is sending them off to face those challenges, what if you could pay these insights forward? Imagine sharing with their future teacher a holistic view of every student – not just their test scores – wrapped up in an easy-to-read reflection card in the time it took you to type their email address? With Mirror, you can.

With Mirror’s newest Summative Focus we help students consider their yearlong achievements and their setbacks, and we offer encouraging feedback to keep them feeling motivated and improve their resilience throughout the process. Some example prompts include:

• What did you discover about your learning style or strategies that helped you overcome challenges during projects this year? 

• What new strategies or approaches would you like to try in future projects? 

• Describe a moment this year when you felt really proud of something you accomplished.

2. Build empathy during project-based learning

The end of the school year is the perfect time to have students dive into creative self-led projects in groups. Mirror’s Workspaces guides students through the project, keeps them engaged, and has them reflect in small groups. 

When students work in small groups they are exposed to each other’s communication and learning styles and must learn to cooperate. This often means developing a vocabulary that is appropriate to the classroom, and it’s not uncommon for conflict to ensue as a result. However, these group experiences give students invaluable insight into their relationships with other students and sharpens their understanding of the role they play in conflicts. 

With Mirror, students can reflect on collaborative projects they participated in, and start considering their classmates’ feelings and perspectives in ways that didn’t seem obvious to them while working together. As a result, reflection can increase empathy in students leading to a stronger, more positive classroom community. Now that’s how you end your school year strong, don’t you think?

3. Student insights = your impact

Reflecting with Mirror gives you tailored insights to support your students before they leave your class, and it also helps you realize the enormous impact you made on them throughout the year. Everything your students learned in your class was because of you and the environment you created for them to learn in. And when students reflect on what they learned, you’ll also be able to identify trends in your teaching that you’d like to improve for next year. Through Mirror’s data dashboard, you’ll be able to uncover teaching blind spots and identify where the learning gaps occurred so you can clearly identify areas in your curriculum that you can improve.

Time and energy will always compete for attention in your classroom, but particularly at the end of year when everyone is running short on steam. With Mirror, it’s truly possible to make reflection a part of every learning activity, for every student, every day.

The Mirror demo program

If you’re interested in using Mirror for end of year reflections, you can still try Mirror for 30 days free.

The post Think you don’t have time to reflect before EOY? Think, think, and THINK, again. appeared first on Swivl.

In this week’s release, we’re heavily focused on bringing reflection to groups, increasing a teacher’s autonomy, and making reflection even more inclusive. Our updates include: enhancing Workspace, easier entry points to get started with reflection, and expansion of grade level support. 

In our recent post, Get more out of groups with reflection, we shared how Mirror makes small group reflection possible, so you can work more autonomously 1:1 with other students, improve collaboration and project-based learning, and still reap tremendous insights about the learning that occurred in the groups you did not directly work with. To recap, Workspace offers:

• Step by step recorded instructions to aid autonomous group learning
• Visual and collaborative tools that support projects such as Whiteboard and Recordings
• Built-in brain breaks
• And customized reflective prompts so you can uncover every learner’s needs every time the group reflects 

Speaking of our customization, we’ve made it even faster to get started with reflection by offering a default two-question experience. Reflections are customizable by grade level, adding more Dimensions (Facts, Feelings, Findings, and Future), applying a Focus (Depth of Knowledge, Retrieval, Improving Relationships), etc., and aligning to your Goal (by recording your lesson objective). 

To support reflection for any age, we just added Pre-K support and improved our question handling and AI analysis across the grade levels. For every student to succeed with the skill of reflection, they must be able to answer questions that are appropriate to their level. And for teachers to succeed in coaching their students with improving those reflective skills, AI scoring and feedback must be leveled appropriately, too. 

We’re also helping students become more comfortable with Mirror by enabling audio-only reflection as the default. When students acclimate more to the process of opening up, you can easily toggle the video on again when you customize your reflections.

Our users’ feedback continues to forge Mirror’s path, so here are some other changes on Mirror that will make reflection more effective and impactful in your class:

• Ability to save the Whiteboard activity with each reflection
• Download reflection videos on mirrortalk.ai
• Questions remain visible on the screen throughout the reflection, so learners are better able to focus on their response, rather than trying to remember the question

When we improve the customization of a reflection and the tools that support reflection, the data you derive from reflection improves too. We’re turning reflection from an art into a scientific skill that can be measured, automatically by AI, to help everyone in your classroom strive toward better outcomes.

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: March 27, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

Interested in using Swivl solutions in your organization but lacking budget or unsure if our tools qualify for your existing federal program funds? In this article, you will find several funding opportunities to acquire our reflective tools. 

ESSER

The CARES Act authorized more than $276 billion in relief for 16,000+ school districts and other local educational agencies awarded as ESSER funds. Recently, federal data showed schools nationwide had spent nearly all of the funding from ESSER I, most of ESSER II, and around one third of ESSER III. This data may not reflect the last several months of spending and it’s estimated that billions of dollars in the commit stage have not yet been spent. The deadline to spend, not commit, ESSER III is September 2024. Don’t be one of the districts left with thousands or even millions of unspent dollars, because when funds expire, they will be returned to the federal government.

‍ESSER funds were explicitly appropriated with flexible intentions to meet various educational needs throughout the pandemic and to support recovery in its aftermath. Education Resource Strategies recently published ten ways to spend your remaining ESSER funds. As per their definitions, Swivl’s solutions can help you use funds to implement coherent, challenging curricula, professional learning, targeted academic support, mentory and advisory, and personalized instruction.

Title I, II, and IV

Other regular funding sources available annually include federal Title programs. Title I, Title II and Title IV also have deadlines that vary state by state, district by district, so it’s important to check with your district or local agency to learn when yours are. Title I provides financial assistance to districts and local education agencies with high percentages of children from low-income families to ensure all children regardless of means have access to a high quality education. Title II works with states and local education agencies and is intended to support teachers, principals, and other school leaders to improve the overall quality of instruction. And finally, ‍Title IV aims to provide all students access to a “well-rounded education” consisting of improvement to school conditions, use of technology, and digital literacy.

USDA rural development

A lesser known grant program for rural districts through USDA’s Rural Development department ensures rural educators and students have equitable access to federal programs in their regions. This grant program requires a 15% match and eligible purchases include: audio, video, and interactive video equipment, hardware, software, and instructional tools for distance education. The deadline to apply occurs annually, typically in April, and funds can be exercised for up to three years.

Swivl is a safe bet for funds in any category, promising long-term dividends for student academic achievement and teacher growth.

How Swivl qualifies

Our tools combine metacognitive and cognitive support through student and teacher reflection, SEL practice, and formative assessment generated by AI.

Hardware enables effective small group instruction, reducing the need to flex schedules for more co-teaching or other support staff to be present in the classroom. 

For student academic achievement, data generated by Swivl solutions provides teachers insights into student progress more efficiently; allowing them to leverage their precious time to prioritize the students who need the most support. 

For professional development, data generated by Swivl solutions can help drive rapid internal shifts in teaching practices and allow teachers to self-serve their own PD, narrowing resource gaps in coaching and mentorship programs. 

For PBIS, Swivl solutions can be used as a proactive solution for administrators and counselors to promote positive behavior and give students a variety of tools to check in, reduce anxiety, and increase mindfulness.

Swivl’s tools are customizable for every type of learner, including adults, and the tools can be utilized in a wide range of activities both in and outside the classroom. 

Better yet, Swivl offers personalized training and support for its products, ensuring your teachers don’t skip a beat in their understanding of the technology stack and can derive actual value from their usage for more extended periods of time.

Finally, Swivl’s solutions are available in a variety of formats, from standalone hardware to across web and mobile platforms, making it an investment that can be utilized in a wide variety of school environments.

To experience Swivl’s suite of offerings before committing your funds, get in touch with us for a free consultation and an opportunity to try solutions before you buy.

The post Where to find funding for Swivl solutions appeared first on Swivl.

What if every reflection experience in your class perfectly fit the learner, the activity, and your objective?

How much more could you learn about student progress? Most importantly, how much more could students learn about themselves?

Today, we’re introducing new capabilities that make Mirror reflections perfect for any learning scenario or need. This is a massive leap towards fully-customized reflections for you and your students.

These updates include automatic alignment between reflection prompts and goals, an easier way to share feedback, and custom response time for reflections.

Customizing reflection with goals

With this release, we’re building on customization of the reflective prompts through our Goal feature. When you set up a reflection, you can apply a focus like depth of thinking, motivation, mindfulness and more – these options contextualize the questions to the selected framework and randomize the questions so the reflection always feels fresh for the student. 

Now, every time you record a goal, Mirror’s AI will further tailor the prompts to that stated goal. And for the most precision, the questions can still be edited by you, so you can always ensure your students are getting the best possible context that helps them align their thinking to your lesson.

By customizing students’ reflections with focus, goals, and workspaces, Mirror enables autonomous small group learning thereby granting you invaluable time to work with students who need more support.

And coming soon, you’ll gain further autonomy for small groups when we roll out guided steps for lessons in our workspace. 

Sharing feedback with students

We’ve heard from our earliest Mirror users that the reflection feedback loop Mirror’s AI is creating should be readily available to share with students and stakeholders to keep everyone on the same page about how students are reflecting and how well they understand your stated learning objectives. That’s why we’ve made it easier for you to share reflection feedback with students, admins, or parents directly from the Dashboard. 

Feedback generated by Mirror’s AI is always subjective to your judgment and you’re always in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding what and how much to share. Each feedback card contains an overall reflection quality summary, insights from the key metrics in the Reflection Dashboard such as Goal ability, Sentiment, Evidence of Thinking, and Growth Mindset, and a link to watch the student’s reflection recording.

Customizing response time

Want to apply some pressure to elicit higher-order responses during reflection? Or maybe you’re trying to teach your students to express themselves more succinctly, without getting too lost in the weeds? Now you can customize student response time as you’re setting up a reflection, our new default is 15 seconds – down from 30 seconds, which our current demo users told us was just too long.

As we continue to develop Mirror, its conversational abilities will seem more natural and we don’t think a time limit will be necessary; in the meantime, we hope this small improvement helps you and students complete reflections more productively.

Next for Mirror

Until now, customizing the reflection experience for every learning scenario and need was simply too time-consuming. That’s why we’re so excited to see how you unlock reflection’s potential in your classroom with these new updates. 

What’s next? Use your Mirror’s customization features to set up student reflections for success. 

Then, tag @ Swivl on X to tell us how it went.

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: February 28, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

Today, we’re announcing the first major software release for Mirror, designed to help educators launch automated student reflections in thirty seconds or less.

Powered by feedback from early users, we’re introducing new capabilities that make Mirror reflections perfect for any learning scenario or need.

Customization

We know from our earliest Mirror users and demo program participants that reflection is important, but to make it a routine, it must be meaningful for every reflector.

An experience where, in 30 seconds or less, a teacher can create prompts for students to reflect. In this release, you can record a goal, objective, or intention for students – important for setting them up for success, but also a great way to hold them accountable for their learning. Additionally, we’ve improved the ways questions can be delivered, allowing you to choose a focus area that either augments the rigor of reflections or teaches students other approaches to thinking about their work, such as focusing on gratitude, motivation, or mindfulness. Finally, we’re continuing to deliver time-saving tools by offering templates that save you time and help make reflection a repeatable routine. 

And soon, Mirror’s AI will generate questions based on your provided goal so you can begin aligning student reflections to your instructional standards and build a tighter feedback loop with them using insights from your Reflection dashboard.

A more interactive and engaging reflection

We know that reflection doesn’t just become a priority in class because teachers love how it saves them time uncovering pain points in their student learning, students have to love it too. To help you make reflection a successful, repeatable routine, we built in a simple, but powerful greeting to get students just as excited about it as you are. Inspired by the viral handshake at the classroom door movement, students will greet Mirror like they might greet themselves or a friend with a high-five or fist bump at the beginning of every reflection. Our hope is that by greeting Mirror each day, it becomes a fun, friendly signal to let students know that they’re going to dive into work now and yes – it’s about to get real, but don’t worry – “you got this!”  We also built in a new cheerful AI voice to guide reflections, we hope you like it!

Improvements to Insights

We debuted our new AI Reflection Dashboard at both TCEA’24 earlier this month and it made a huge splash! We’ve improved scoring and separated each metric and companion summary so it’s cleaner and easier to understand where immediate next steps need to take place to support students.

Next for Mirror

We’re excited to see how educators will use these updates to automate reflection in their schools. Driven by your feedback, we’re working hard to make reflections even more customized, engaging, and insightful for students and teachers. 

What’s next? Use your Mirror to create a custom reflection for your students. Then, tag @Swivl on X to tell us how it went. 

Don’t have Mirror yet? See below.

The Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of automating reflections firsthand, sign up for the Mirror demo program. This free trial is open to all educators based in the United States and Canada.

The post Mirror release: February 9, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

Educators often hear, “The best PD is just down the hall.” 

While there’s much to learn from collaborating with colleagues, you can take this saying a step further: “The best PD is in your own classroom.”

This saying points to the value of making reflection part of your routine. Reflection is a habit that “allows teachers, student teachers, and teaching assistants to understand themselves, their personal philosophies, and the dynamics of their classroom more deeply.”

It only takes a few minutes per week to reflect, partner with a peer to get feedback, and take action towards incremental changes in your everyday routine. Those small changes become habits, and those habits become automatic. You can then move onto more complex challenges, beginning a virtuous cycle of improvement.

The new Sessions for Reflection helps you turn reflection into a weekly routine without turning on a camera. At its heart, Sessions for Reflection is a writing process that helps educators dig deeper on their own, and make collaboration more productive and insightful.

How Sessions for Reflection works

Step 1: Set a Goal

Goals are the backbone of the reflection process. Even micro goals, set on a weekly basis, can start to make a difference in your thinking and how you approach your classroom environment. We recommend starting each week with a small goal, and as you gain more confidence and time, increase the rigor.

Examples of goals: 

• Increase my wait time between asking questions
• Practice closing the redirection loop to positively encourage behavior change
• Model identifying negative feelings and how to reconcile them in the presence of my peers

Step 2: (Optional) Incorporate Video Evidence

Video evidence is helpful when you want to add more context. Remember this is completely optional! When you are ready to incorporate video evidence, you will always have the opportunity to do so after setting your goal. 

Pro Tip: To simplify review and cut down on annotation time, limit your video evidence to 10 minutes in length. If you would like to incorporate an existing video from your library, our trim and cut tool has got you covered.

Step 3: Reflect 

As you’re wrapping up for the week, it’s time to think, wonder, and articulate how well you’re meeting or exceeding your goal for the week. Use the Reflection page to explain what went well and what you’ll need to work on in the future to realize this goal or embark on a new one.

Step 4: (Optional) Ask for feedback

Reflection alone can only go so far in determining your next steps. Involving a partner will help you accelerate your thinking. Just hearing your ideas reflected back to you helps you step back and process those ideas differently. You might shift the way you think about your most important takeaways and next steps as a result.

Pro Tip: You can share a Session with your peer through Direct Share. Your peer’s steps are simple:

• Review your Goal;
• Annotate your video (only applicable if a video is present)
• And post their own Reflection, perhaps offering you some next steps or advice for the future

If you need any support with Sessions or our other tools for reflection, contact us at support@swivl.com.

The post The new Sessions for Reflection starts with putting the camera away appeared first on Swivl.

Relationships among educators and with students are foundational to the positive culture you create in your school community. As we shared in our recent blog, Why Video Coaching is Important This Fall, “teachers who have a strong, trusting relationship with their coach or mentor can use that relationship as a model of what to build with each student they teach.”  When educators participate in video-based coaching it is imperative that the tools they use facilitate respect, trust, and instructive communication to help sustain strong relationships.

We already know video is the ideal medium for observations because the most actionable feedback is gained from gathering and examining evidence of a teacher’s practice in a real classroom setting. Unlike in-person observations, videos portray authentic classroom environments where both teacher and students can act naturally, unencumbered by a visitor. When videos depict authentic classroom experiences, feedback becomes more specific and leads to greater growth outcomes too. Feedback tools like our Time-Stamped Annotation also make it easy for educators to set goals, track their progress, and communicate about what was observed in class. 

This is why Swivl is making feedback a priority with our Teams product release today, with Sessions.

Sessions make for better feedback

Feedback without clarity results in confusion. Classroom observations should have clear intentions. In our newest feature, Sessions, we’ve made it so you set your Intention upfront. As with many meaningful activities associated with delivering feedback, the first step is to define your “look-fors” not only for yourself but for your feedback partners. Important questions to ask yourself when setting an Intention for your video:

• What do you hope to accomplish in this video? 
• Does the evidence you will record allow you an opportunity to achieve your Intention? If not, before you proceed it might be helpful to go back and record another short segment of the instruction that allows you to explore the context of your Intention. 
• Where do you want your viewers to focus so they know how to reflect, question, and comment throughout your video?

Example: “In this math lesson, I would like to analyze which students struggle when I ask them to describe the method they chose to arrive at their answer.”

To continue your Session make sure to provide feedback, in the form of Time-Stamped Annotation on the video. This is the real “meat” so be clear with your response. The more time you take to reflect on what evidence you choose to address, the more evidence there will be for others  to respond to and reflect on. This is also a great time to highlight your “glows” and identify your “grows” with Web Bookmarking. Start comments with Prompts for guidance, and utilize Rubrics that tie into your organization’s coaching or self-reflection frameworks. When combined, these tools pave the way for structured, meaningful feedback on every observable teaching practice exhibited throughout the video.

When you are finished with Time-Stamped Annotations, it is time to consider the entire observation, summarize your experience, and define next steps.

Specifically: 

• Did you meet the Intention you set? 
• If not, what will you do differently next time? 
• What are your next steps from here?
• How will you use what you learned in this video to impact other areas of your instruction going forward? 

Example: “I learned that a majority of students in my green group struggled with describing the methodology they chose to develop the answer to the problems. In my next video, I’ll work on some new strategies to help them break down those building blocks of problem-solving and utilize scaffolded questioning to help them answer my targeted question around methodology.”

We have left ample room for you to develop a meaningful Summary response so take your time when using this space to conclude your actions in this Session.

Watch this 30-second video on Sessions to see just how easy it really is.

We hope that these improvements will bring greater purpose for your experience inside Teams so you can focus on the heart of the observation process: Clear and prescriptive feedback based on video evidence.

The post We’ve Made Actionable Feedback Central to the Teams Platform appeared first on Swivl.