Chapter 10 Reading Reflection

Teachers should allow students time to reflect on their project after they have spend so much time on it. Setting time aside for reflection will help students feel like their project was important and they will be able to actually see how much they accomplished from start to finish. Reflection can be the one thing that wraps up the entire project and helps it stick in their brains for a very long time. A teacher asking too many reflection questions could overwhelm the students so they should really think about what they want to ask. There should be a lot of planning that goes into the final questions to reflect upon on the teachers part.
As students get older and can think more critically the teacher should allow them to make decisions for subsequent projects. The teacher should ask the students where they see the project going next, what questions were sparked, what they are wondering about next, what else they want to learn and how do they plan on going about it.
Teachers should build traditions in their schools so that students who are younger are already excited about their projects years before they are in your classroom or grade. One teacher, for example, left a project based classroom and ran into a young lady several years later. The lady told her how bummed she was when she found out the teacher had left because she was so excited to do the salmon project that her brothers did years before she was going to be in that grade. This proves that siblings talk and they can get others excited about projects done on a traditional basis many years before the youngest steps foot in the classroom.
Teachers should celebrate students work by hosting an event for the school to come visit the classroom as well as parents and friends. Then they should display the students work for others to view for some time after the project is over with. Having a main celebration at the end of the year to show a retrospective "year in review" of projects for people to view is always a good way to show how much the students have accomplished all year long.
Reflection is an important piece to our project on food preservation because we want students to remember everything they have done and to be able to see where else they could go with our project.