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.

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.

It’s no surprise that companies and sports teams build reflection into their work. Leaders know that group reflection, like watching and discussing game tape, leads to deeper learning. We get better when we reflect together.

While group work is a staple in classrooms, group reflections are rare. The logistics of planning activities for and assessing group reflection have made it impractical. Until now.

With our next major Mirror release (Estimated March 25th), we’ll make group reflection more convenient, powerful and automated than ever. When we do, we’ll also – without irony – be making group work itself more convenient, powerful and automated than ever.  

This article will explain what’s coming and how you can expect to use it soon.

Just start a reflection

Set up the reflection as you normally would for individual students by adding a goal, a focus, dimensions, and more. Once it is set up, multiple students at once can pick their name/profile and get started. That’s it! Mirror is set up for group reflection out of the box. You don’t need to do anything. It even customizes the greeting for groups to help build camaraderie before they begin answering the reflective questions. Once complete, the reflective insights can start to give you a sense about how the whole group is thinking about their learning.

Pro tip: You can encourage more voices and avoid the same student speaking every time by adjusting the response length to longer intervals. 

It’s quick, easy and effective. But that’s just the beginning. During reflection setup, you also have the ability to add what we call the Workspace. This is where group work itself can be transformed. 

The Workspace has tools for you to build group activities that enhance learning and directly lead students toward reflection. All you need to do is add your first Step to get started with Workspace. These Steps are progressive instructions that include recorded and transcribed directions and incorporate various learning tools.

These directions and tools are presented automatically to any group of students that are using Mirror. All it takes is a couple minutes to set up, either on Mirror itself at Mirror on the web. You can add as few or as many steps as you like! 

Here we’ll outline some scaffolded examples of how to include Steps in your Workspaces. 

Recharge

Learning is stressful. Part of adapting to transitions in the classroom is figuring out how to quickly calm down and refocus from task to task. And reflection’s role in learning makes it worth making sure the transition was effective. To aid that, Mirror has a wide selection of tools for Recharging exercises – all of which take less than 2 minutes to minimize disruption. Exercises can be selected for their calming or energizing effects, or for whatever you think is appropriate for the classroom at that time. When done, students are automatically progressed into their reflection – refreshed with a new perspective – and for you to get those all important reflective insights on how they are thinking. 

Guided activity

Each step includes the option of voice recording and transcribed directions (which can also be typed). When activated for the student, the voice recording is automatically played. They can see the transcription throughout the activity and replay the directions as needed. You can guide students through any activity you desire! Want them to work with manipulatives? Perhaps they should practice their drawing skills? Want them to read a poem? All of that is now possible in a “learning center” that is fully automated. Once the activity is done, students are once again automatically prompted to reflect on that activity, accelerating the learning that just occurred, and furthering the insights you gain from how they are processing the experience. 

Pro tip: Want to add some constructive pressure to that activity? You can even set a countdown timer. 

Make it visual

The Workspace’s learning tools aren’t just for group directions and management, they are also for making learning visual. Just follow the same setup steps as before and select Whiteboard. Students will be presented with the same directions and a visual thinking canvas.  

They can work on math problems, mind maps, sketching skills and more! They can do it with Mirror standing upright or on its back for a real canvas experience.

Another tool to make thinking and skills visual is a Recording (which can also be used for capturing teaching skills). Have students practice delivery presentations or oral arguments. Both students and teachers will be able to “see” their skills in action. Once again, this activity is followed by a reflection on what they observed, what they realized, and insights about their thinking gets passed along to you. 

Multi-step activities

You can add as many steps as you like. As you add more steps, the more extended student work you can set up. For example, you could set up a Design Thinking exercise – build a spaghetti cantilever. Step 1 could be to watch a YouTube video to get some background knowledge or inspiration to start the project. Step 2 could be to use the whiteboard tool to sketch out their initial ideas. Step 3 could be to start prototyping and building at their desk with a time limit. Step 4 could be to record a presentation of their work so far, and then have them transition to a spoken reflection on what they learned from the experience. At the end, you will see a summary of the activity with reflective insights on what the students learned. 

At the end, you will see a summary of the activity with reflective insights on what the students learned. 

Multiple Mirrors

Long term, you can even imagine a classroom as having multiple Mirrors. This makes daily individual reflection even more accessible to every student. It also makes it possible for teachers to set up many autonomous small groups for project-based learning instead of just one. This would allow educators to circulate between groups and facilitate as they see fit instead of being anchored to one. And each group would be generating reflective insights for the teacher to gain a clearer picture of their work from day to day. This is one vision of a classroom of the future where teachers can truly teach at a higher order. 

More group work is better

We built Mirror to support group work and reflection for a reason. We believe more group work and more group reflection promotes better learning. 

Like teaching has gone from sage to guide, we also think technology – and more specifically personal devices – also needs to get out of the way to support learning. It’s proven that students learn better when they are engaged physically in what they are doing. Small group work also accelerates the development of their social emotional skills – they can observe each other, make eye contact and have to figure out how to work together. These are skills that are incredibly important toward retaining competitive advantage over AI. And prioritizing group work automatically promotes the kind of learning activities we want to see more of in classrooms – project based learning, design thinking, inquiry, and more. 

Time and logistics often limit what can be done in classrooms with groups. This is why technology CAN still help and why we made Mirror. It now makes it possible to do radically more small group work than ever. 

Stay tuned as our reflective insights for groups also make major leaps in the coming months ahead!

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 Get more out of groups with reflection appeared first on Swivl.

Mirror makes it easy to give individualized feedback to every student.

Marcy Curr | Pocatello/Chubbuck School District 25

USE CASE

Help students improve communication skills through reflection

Marcy Curr

Speech and Debate Teacher

School/District

Pocatello/Chubbuck School District 25

Grade Level High School

Reflection challenges in speech and debate

Idaho-based speech and debate teacher Marcy Curr has always valued reflection for herself and her students – who are 2024 Debate State Champions. However she faced a few obstacles when she asked her students to reflect on their speaking skills and debate performance.

Marcy began to observe a disconnect between the types of reflection she asked her students to complete and the nature of the course. “I’ve always struggled with asking my students to complete written reflections because this is a verbal communication course.” She tried giving students rubrics for self-assessment but felt they did not foster an authentic reflection experience. Time constraints also limited the amount of personalized feedback she could give students. “There’s not enough time in a day to give feedback to each of our students.”

Providing immediate feedback holds extra value in Marcy’s classes – she seeks to help students improve speech and communication skills that can be challenging to self-correct. “If I wait for the end of the speech to give feedback, they don’t remember what they did,” she explains. Overall, Marcy needed a more engaging and efficient tool for reflection and feedback.

A smooth experience leads to real progress

Marcy sees a direct connection between introducing Mirror as a reflection tool and seeing an improvement in her students’ communication skills. “With Mirror their next speech is better because they’ve taken time to reflect in between speeches on what they could improve on.”

With students reflecting and receiving feedback with Mirror during class, she now has more time to review speech recordings with individual students and provide coaching to them. “Mirror lightens the burden for teachers,” Marcy explains. 

Mirror’s reflection feedback and scoring system also acts as a new source of motivation for her students, pushing them to meta-reflect on their own reflections and seek areas of improvement. “They’re watching their reflections to see where it’s says, ‘next time to improve your reflection work on this.’” This process of self-analysis, sparked by a desire to see their scores rise, has led to a deeper engagement with their reflection process.

Part of why Marcy and her students have adopted Mirror so quickly is its ease of use. “The guided process was super easy,” Marcy explained, describing the reflection workflow. Getting started was also a breeze for her. “I loved Mirror’s unboxing process. It made me feel like I could order a Mirror for anyone in my department.”

Daily reflection and more feedback

Day to day, Marcy’s students use Mirror to reflect on their speech and debate skills, identify areas of improvement, and refine their work. “I make them watch and evaluate videos of their speeches,” Marcy explains.

Mirror allows her to shorten the time frame between when students learn or practice a skill, and when they reflect on it. During debate practice, students will deliver speeches, and then immediately go to their Mirror and reflect. “We did a reflection after every single one of their speeches,” Marcy notes about a recent practice session.

When written notes from a teacher might be impractical, Mirror has opened up new opportunities for reflection and feedback. “My students frequently have to get up and give a one minute introduction speech. I can’t type meaningful feedback in that time frame. Instead, I’m going to record them. Then, they’re going to use Mirror to reflect.”

Marcy has already planned expanded use cases for Mirror into her upcoming courses. “In my syllabus for next trimester, I’ve built in reflections a couple of times a week using Mirror.”

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 Elevating student speaking skills through reflection 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.

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