Today, we’re excited to officially announce MirrorTalk.ai the mobile and web version of the Mirror, which we launched earlier this year. MirrorTalk has free and premium plans to cover everyone’s needs.

MirrorTalk is a tool for reflecting out loud that can be customized and focused for assessment, creative thinking, motivation, development, and more. Each reflection brings AI-powered insights on how you are thinking, and how to improve.

Modernity has made us less reflective than we’ve ever been. While engagement gets the overwhelming priority in education and life, we already know learning comes from reflection. Our aim is to restore the balance in our minds between engagement and reflection by leveraging AI to open up unique opportunities that aid how we reflect. 

Reflecting with MirrorTalk is as simple as talking about what you’re working on. Start by stating your learning objective, and you’ll immediately get a set of customized reflection prompts, which can be tailored to the language, length, or focus that fits your needs. From there, MirrorTalk helps you talk it out in the comfort of an objective and impartial listener. When you’re done, you get instant feedback, insights, and scores to help you understand and improve your thinking. You can use it yourself or assign reflections to students, teachers, leaders, and more. 

The reflective foundations

MirrorTalk automates reflection so you can talk it out with the frequency and personalization you’ve always wanted, but didn’t think you had the time for. And MirrorTalk’s Dashboard shows you insights about your thinking you may never have realized you needed, until now.

The lesson

Based on your reflection, we identify the Lesson – a learning gap or adaptive lesson that you may be struggling with. It’s like having developmental psychologists Jean Piaget or Robert Kegan consult you on any one of your reflections. 

Understanding

By reporting on how well you construct knowledge and derive meaning, Understanding identifies how you’re generating insights or coming to new realizations.

Zone

Based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Zone identifies the optimal stress levels for your learning activities and helps you fine-tune the challenges you take on. 

Mindset

Expanding on Carol Dweck’s work, Mirror analyzes your thinking for evidence of a fixed or growth Mindset, then goes even deeper, analyzing the tone of your self-talk and the level of motivation represented in your thinking.

We even present data on developmental stages, cognitive and social skills, and cognitive biases. We also have more unique and powerful insights in the works.

MirrorTalk for everyone

MirrorTalk’s reflections can be customized for PK-12, higher education, and adults, and both the content and language of dashboard insights are developmentally appropriate for the participant.

• K12 classrooms: Set up reflections on any learning objective, for any grade, with the ability to focus on depth of knowledge, retrieval, creativity, problem solving, and more. Get feedback on how students are understanding what they need to learn and use our reflective foundations to guide curriculum, assessments, and PD.

• Professional Development: Most PD and coaching initiatives are slow and create dependence on institutions to make progress. MirrorTalk gets teachers thinking in motion automatically and prepares them to take on curriculum changes, formal coaching, certifications, and more. Also, we believe using MirrorTalk with students – to peer inside the minds of learners – is the next great leap forward beyond feedback from video coaching.

• Higher Ed: Help students across the whole university stay engaged in their academic growth, and help specific departments create better outcomes. Aid student teachers in their field work and even get them instant feedback on their lesson plans from reflection data of the students they are teaching.

New possibilities

We believe MirrorTalk opens up new possibilities in education and for humanity itself. Not only does it help restore balance in our minds with time spent over-engaging, it could help us reflect more. By helping people learn foundational life lessons with less difficulty and suffering, our vision is to help everyone learn and grow better than ever before. 

Get started

Ready to experience MirrorTalk? Sign up on the web or download the mobile app today and get a 90-day trial of our Pro plan, absolutely free. After that, you can continue using the free version, or invest in a plan that fits your needs. Plus, don’t miss the chance to demo the Mirror hardware device, and experience its power as a 3-in-1 reflection station, recording tool, and interactive small group guide. 

In a constantly accelerating world, the ability to adapt is more important than ever. Investing in building students’ and teachers’ reflective foundations will make it possible for everyone to thrive.

The post Introducing MirrorTalk.ai appeared first on Swivl.

Mirror guides my second graders through reflection questions on their own, and then I get data on their answers to help me support each student’s needs.

Melisa Hayes | Hilliard Crossing Elementary School, Hilliard, OH

USE CASE

Creating more autonomous and deeply engaged elementary students

Melisa Hayes

2nd Grade Teacher

School/District:

Hilliard Crossing Elementary School, Hilliard, OH

Grade Level 2nd grade

Discovering Mirror: A game-changer in guided learning

Juggling time constraints and wanting to engage my students were the main reasons I was so excited to start using Mirror. This tool allows my kids to reflect on their work at any time. It’s versatile, and any age or ability can use it. My kids can access Mirror at any point of the day, and it fits into my limited schedule.

In my room, Mirror is in a corner where kids can go anytime to use it when they want to reflect. Mirror guides my second graders through reflective questions independently. They get immediate AI-generated feedback, and then I get data on their answers to those questions that help me support each student’s needs. 

And guess what? They love Mirror! 

Not only is it a reflective tool–it can be transformed into an interactive workspace that supports individual and small-group guided learning. It’s amazing for me as an educator to be able to set up the Mirror for small groups. I record instructions, set Mirror to turn into a functional whiteboard, program brain breaks, and stretches, and then bring students back to reflection as the foundation of the activity.

Giving voice to the youngest students

I have always faced challenges when having my students reflect on their learning. Time, of course, is always a factor; but also, there is the added challenge of keeping my students engaged enough to reflect on a lesson, subject, or their behavior. Mirror lets them take that initiative right in class, creating an environment where even young students can feel autonomy over their actions.

Giving my kids the ability to choose how to give their brains a break and center themselves is such a great way to promote their self-advocacy. Mirror does this with the Recharge feature, a series of movement activities aimed at either focus, energy, or rest. Mirror is also customized for each student. They can color code their “profile” and choose the animation they’d like to be greeted with – one of my kids chooses a high five and always giggles when it comes on!

When used in conjunction with a stronger reflective foundation, Mirror has the ability to help even the youngest learners reach a higher order of thinking. This is something we need to consider more in the age of AI.

Try Mirror, commitment-free, with your students

Do your students need more cohesion in their learning experience? Could you use more support amidst time constraints? Explore supporting your students’ learning with reflection. Try Mirror with students in your class for free today!

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Sarah Marin, a 7th-grade English teacher at Hildebrandt Intermediate School, assigns all of her students an end-of-year research project where they present on a country of their choice. This year, she gave her students the option to use Swivl’s new interactive reflection station Mirror to complete verbal project reflections. In previous years, she had her students complete their written reflections. In Sarah’s final tally, 59 of her students chose to complete their reflections with Mirror instead. 

Sarah found that introducing Mirror integrated seamlessly within her classroom assessment dynamic. Most of her students are 12, going on 13, and grew up being comfortable with technology, so they immediately gravitated toward reflection with Mirror. Even students who typically struggle to focus quickly grasped how to use Mirror.  For one of her neurodivergent students in particular, Mirror gave them an immediate confidence boost. Throughout the year, her student had struggled with focus and comprehension in other exercises. While using Mirror, however, this student took the initiative and easily guided themselves through completing the assignment. Her student intuitively understood the reflection’s workflow when presented through Mirror, and stayed focused on the objective throughout the reflection prompts.

Better student outcomes

Sarah loved that her students who chose to complete their reflections with Mirror answered with full fidelity. “It forced them to truly articulate how they had felt about the project,” Sarah explained. “Not having to talk to a teacher and feel judged really enabled my students to open up and use their metacognitive abilities.” 

Reflecting aloud prepared the students for a follow-up reflection discussion. “I noticed that some of the kids who did Mirror first did a better job on their overall reflection because they had already had to put their thoughts into words. It helped some of my students think more deeply about things they had struggled with, making it easier to convey their thoughts in writing.”

Those new dimensions of candor, gleaned through Mirror, provided Sarah with new insights into how she could support each student for the rest of the school year and how to structure the project for better results next year.

Sarah plans to continue using Mirror, seeing applications for self-reflection for next year. She is looking forward to using it at the beginning of the school year to measure each student’s comprehension. Sarah is confident she can use Mirror to individually support each of her students more quickly.

Read more about how Klein ISD educators are using Mirror

• Kleb Intermediate School –  Instructional Specialist in Digital Learning, Kim Sharp, introduces Mirror with her co-teaching partner, Christy Stewart, to their Advanced Humanities class.
• Klein ISD –  Monica Shallenberger, the Director of Professional Learning for the Klein Independent School District, uses Mirror to support her teachers amidst stringent state budgets. 

Interested in seeing how Mirror can support your students and teachers? Sign up to participate in a 30-day, free demo of Mirror.

The post Using verbal reflections to improve student writing appeared first on Swivl.

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.

Students leave Mirror feeling empowered by its feedback because they pushed themselves beyond their comfort zone.

Julie Witczak | Deerfield Public Schools District 109

USE CASE

SEL, self-expression, self-improvement, confidence, motivation

Julie Witczak

Communication Media Arts Teacher (CMA)

School/District:

Deerfield Public Schools District 109, IL

Grade Level 7-8

At the end of a project, my students often turn in journals with reflections about their experiences. I have a hard time grading them because I know how hard they worked on these projects, but the journal entries just don’t represent their efforts. I wasn’t seeing the evidence of the work I knew they were capable of. They also often forget to journal daily or update their entries. They take their final work day to write the entire reflection and numerous things are missing or forgotten, so I end up with a lot of simple answers to complex questions.  

When I introduced Mirror for verbal reflection, students finally took the initiative to talk to it and they didn’t have to be reminded – they were excited to do it! Students also had a lot more to say when speaking rather than writing and Mirror’s personalized feedback makes them each feel individually heard. If I had conducted 1:1 verbal conversations with each student instead of Mirror, my entire class time would be spent listening and I wouldn’t have time to analyze their responses thoroughly or offer fair and accurate feedback.

Instead, through Mirror’s dashboard, I’m able to understand and address students’ immediate problems through their reflection scores. After each reflection they also get immediate feedback directly from Mirror, which they accept more readily because they don’t feel judged. Their reflections are now more detailed, exciting, and structured and the students actually apply the feedback in future assignments.

I’ve been inviting students to use Mirror as an option for every project. I had 5 students per class take me up on it during our first project and participation has tripled since then! Offering choice for using Mirror means students experience more enjoyment over their mandatory journal entries which were often hastily written and painful for them to finish. And as opposed to journaling which doesn’t give the students immediate feedback, Mirror engages them daily and they thrive on its feedback.

Some of my students have even begun to open up more. I’ve gotten to know them better by listening to their thoughts and expressions. Students leave Mirror feeling empowered by its feedback because they pushed themselves beyond their comfort zone.

I have one student in particular who asks me for her reflection score daily. For her, the score is a measure of her daily improvement. When she reflects with Mirror, the next day, her goal is to raise that number. It’s great to see she cares about working on these skills. 

I’m excited to take time over the summer to plan out my next steps with Mirror. I have a class I’ve looped with for two years. They will be 8th graders next year and they meet just once a week for only 27 minutes. I want to start the year with a set of SEL-focused questions and by the end of the year, I expect to have a full dashboard of responses about their experiences from the past three years they have been together. Then I’ll share their reflections with the incoming 6th graders who will start this class with me for the next three years. My current kids can share their struggles, challenges, and growth, and my future kids can hear words of wisdom from kids who have just graduated. I’m excited about this possibility!

I also advise the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance) at the middle school. I’m certain that Mirror will offer them a safe space to reflect on their identity journeys and how sharing their experiences may positively impact future students who join the organization.

I am so excited to see where Mirror will help me take my students next year and beyond!

Swivl Mirror demo

Want to experience the transformational effects of reflection with your students? Sign up to try Mirror for free for 30-days. During the demo your school will have dedicated support – from unboxing, personalizing Mirror for your goals, and anything else you may need to be successful with student reflections.

The post Helps students motivate themselves 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.

In our latest Mirror release, we’ve listened to your feedback and are excited to bring you improved workflows, enhanced visibility for reflection feedback, and more. These updates make reflecting with Mirror more insightful and accessible for educators and students.

Faster student and teacher workflows

Logging in and exiting group mode is now more seamless with email and pin code access. This provides a smoother and more secure log-in experience and takes another thing off a teacher’s plate.

After unlocking student mode, teachers are now brought directly to the Dashboard. This helps teachers gain insights about their students’ learning gaps even faster. 

Immediate feedback on the dashboard

Immediate feedback is now surfaced on the dashboard. This provides a better experience for both teachers and students, allowing them another opportunity to learn from feedback and improve their reflective skills faster.

Other improvements

In addition to these features, we’ve made several other improvements and updates:

• Reflections will continue uploading even after you logout or shutdown your Mirror before the upload has finished.
• The Coach role now allows instructional coaches to view all reflections within a Group.

Next steps

As always, your feedback drives our improvements, and we’re committed to making Mirror better for everyone.

What’s next? Set up your reflections with these new features and tag @Swivl on X to share your experiences.

Join the Mirror demo program

If you want to experience the power of Mirror for individual and group reflection, 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: May 23, 2024 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.

In this week’s release, we’re bringing more delight, more motivation, and more learning to the student experience. How are we doing that? Instant feedback on student reflections!

This update also includes: the new Summative Focus for end of year reflections, flexible response times for adults and older students, and better insights.

Now, students get personalized feedback read aloud to them just seconds after they complete a reflection. We’ve heard from many Mirror demo users that reflection feedback is the most powerful part of the experience. But until now, there was no easy, immediate way for students to access their feedback. With this update, we’re excited to see how students can become even more invested in building their reflective skills, as they instantly read and hear about the insights they’ve shared, and how they can reflect even more deeply next time.

There’s no better way to experience the new instant feedback feature than with the new Summative focus. This reflection focus works perfectly for end-of-year student reflections, and can help you simplify your summer planning, amplify your productivity, and even deepen connectivity with students one last time before they advance grade levels. Use this focus with Workspace to automate and add reflection to end-of-year group projects. 

To make reflecting with Mirror more flexible across ages and grade levels, we’ve updated the way response times work. Users now have 15 seconds to reflect on each question as a default. For younger students, 15 seconds is the limit. However, older students and adult users have unlimited time to respond, with the option to move on to the next question when they’re ready.

In addition to these updates, we’ve also improved insights across all reflections, making them more grade-level appropriate.

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: April 18, 2024 appeared first on Swivl.

This article was written in partnership with IDEA Illinois. To explore partnership opportunities with Swivl, email Swivl Community Engagement Manager, Sara Candela.

For centuries we’ve known there are two requirements for learning: engagement and reflection. Yet, in recent years we’ve greatly emphasized engagement, often at the expense of reflection. It’s enough of a shift to wonder, is that the right direction?

Jean Piaget argued that we reflect on our experiences to move through specific life stages. Similarly, Robert Kegan argued that we advance to the next stage of development when we’ve reflected on issues from the previous stage, a process of mental transformation.

They, and others, came to the same conclusion about learning: we engage with people, activities, and information, then we reflect. As a result, we make new realizations that become a part of us. That’s how learning and growth occur.

However, modern students experience a massive imbalance of these two requirements. Students’ lives are filled with more engagement than they can handle, and arguably less reflection than they need. The reflection that is part of their school experience is too limited.

Teachers are increasingly feeling that they have to work harder than ever to reach students whose test scores and behavior often seem to be getting worse.

We believe a new path forward that addresses these challenges is possible by seeing reflection for what it is: a necessary tool for learning. 

Over-engaged

Many students are over-engaged before they even enter school. 

Addictive social apps, immersive video games, and, now, powerful generative AI present kids with people, places, and experiences far more interesting than the four walls of a classroom. 

How can a math worksheet compare to viral videos? More and more, we’re seeing that it doesn’t. 

It seems that classroom learning has become just another experience for students, albeit not a very engaging one, and one that currently doesn’t help students develop the ability to see themselves as learners.

As many report, if learning doesn’t capture students’ attention, they see no reason to pursue the challenge. Take for example, the recent post on X, in which a student reflection included the response “I don’t really see school as a place to learn. I see it as doing work to achieve a grade.”

Ironically, pursuing student engagement as a standalone goal is a common response to these challenges of modernity. If teachers made class as interesting, relevant, and entertaining as students’ digital lives, the thinking goes, they might sit down and do the work. 

But school will never be as engaging as consumer technology, nor is it obvious that it should be. For one, the precise relationship between learning and engagement is still surprisingly unclear. As renowned education thinker Alfie Kohn said, “Engagement is insufficient because we need to consider whether a task demands mental effort.” Emphasizing engagement overlooks the other required piece of the learning process, reflection.

Reflection is the antidote

We believe students need more reflection than ever to integrate their daily learning experiences.

This can happen by recognizing that reflection is actually a skill students can develop. Through a significant increase in both the quantity and quality of reflection, students will have the opportunity to integrate their subjective learning experiences as objective lessons and to start seeing themselves as learners again.

When students are presented with quality, relevant reflection prompts on a regular basis, and they receive feedback to help build their reflective skills, they gain the ability to:

• Narrate their learning experiences with increasing levels of detail and accuracy
• Identify feelings they’ve experienced about or during their learning
• Think through new realizations that arise from experiences, and 
• Plan goals or next steps to make use of new learnings

The sequence above describes the process of transformation of the mind – where subjective learning is turned into objective lessons, and students gain the ability to see themselves as learners. Yet reflection’s place in school as a required tool for learning has been limited or often even removed, especially amidst recent educational trends.

Where reflection is most common today is in SEL programs. While reflection for SEL is indeed valuable, we need to remember its important place in the learning process, so students can reap its full benefits. 

Perhaps most importantly, we should recognize that reflection is the integration of learning and social-emotional development into one process, and that reflection is a skill that can be developed with practice. Seeing this opens up possibilities for new approaches in both areas.

Transforming minds

There are a few different perspectives on how to handle education’s challenges of modernity. Some advocate for a reversion to tradition, with a focus on academic rigor and emotional resilience. Others make a more progressive case, leaning into student engagement and social-emotional needs above all else. 

We’re realizing that the best path forward is a new, third way that integrates the best of both sides. One that is both uniquely possible and uniquely needed today.

This new path we’re forging is where teachers pair every opportunity for student engagement with high-quality student reflection, and personalized, immediate feedback in response to those reflections. Now, with the power of AI, we can make the development of reflective skill a reality. This approach builds students’ social and emotional skills in the context of supporting their academic learning.

Most importantly, when we finally restore reflection’s rightful place in our over-engaged world, we give students the skills and opportunity needed to integrate all their subjective experiences into objective lessons, transforming their minds for the better. 

Let’s go beyond giving students more to think about. Let’s help them build a better mind to think with.

Try Mirror free for 30 days

Curious how Mirror can automate reflection in your classroom? Signing up for the Mirror demo gives your school dedicated support and an opportunity to try Mirror for free. Throughout your demo, our team will walk you through unboxing, personalizing Mirror for your goals, and anything else you may need to be successful with reflection.

The post Reflection: the under-emphasized key to learning appeared first on Swivl.