Students worked in groups to show me their vision of what good citizens in their community would look like. This picture shows students picking up trash and sharing money.

After a conversation with a guest speaker about immigration and what it means to be a good citizen, a student writes this reflection showing me her genuine inquisitiveness and sincere curiosity for this issue.

This student’s writing is from the first lesson of my “What Does it Mean to Be a Good Citizen’ unit. He was writing an informal response to some similarities he noticed between people I had showed them that I thought were good citizens. He is comparing Mama Tingó of the DR and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and is able to express these similarities in writing. “I notice that Alexandria and Mama Tingo took a job and they both helped a community and they were both brave to help the country and take a job.”

A huge part of my students learning to express themselves through reading, writing, and speaking is having a self-reflective practice which allows them to have the time to deepen their own way of learning which inevitably deepens their understanding of the content. My engineering unit had a huge self-reflection component in order to deepend student’s shared understanding of what teamwork and collective learning looks like. This is a student’s reflection on the entire boat-making unit.