Student Self-Awareness & Self-Knowledge: Ask the Right Questions to Understand Your Students
What every student should know starts with themselves and moves outwards to your content area: self-knowledge ➝ content knowledge.
– Terry Heick
INTRO
Student self-awareness and self-knowledge should precede a student’s understanding of educational materials. This activity is a great way to learn more about your students while fostering a sense of self-reflection. These questions revolve around the learner’s identity and can set a tone in your classroom emphasizing self-knowledge as the ultimate goal of learning.
THINK skills and behaviors are often grounded in critical thinking and inquiry. Examples include: ideation, creativity, innovation, and design thinking. Ultimately, THINK is about approaching situations and ideas with versatile and intentional thinking patterns.
OBJECTIVES
- Learn more about your students, while fostering a sense of self-reflection.
- Emphasize with students that self-knowledge is the ultimate goal of learning.
ACTIVITY
Ask students essential questions like the great examples in the provided article resource.
Here are 10 examples (there are 20 more in the article!):
- What do you need from me (as your teacher) more than anything else?
- When was the last time you’ve solved a problem?
- What does success in the classroom mean to you? How would you define it?
- Where (or ‘who’) do you want to ‘be’ in ten years? Next year? This time next week?
- What do teachers sometimes misunderstand about you as a learner?
- What does it mean to ‘study’?
- Do you think of yourself as ‘smart’? (What does ‘smart’ mean?)
- How do you respond to complex texts, media, tasks, projects, etc.? Is it different than how you respond to complexity in the ‘real world’?
- What should school ‘do’?
- If I get out of your way this year, what will you be able to do?
Suggested strategies for this activity (there are more in the article!):
- Give to small groups to answer questions
- Let students choose the question(s) they want to answer
- Assign specific questions as a blog post or journal prompt
TIPS
- Little Things are smaller efforts you can do tomorrow, or within the next week or so.
- While these quick and easy practices can produce big impacts, remember, this is not a quick fix: You’re establishing schoolwide changes that should better serve all students for years to come
- Like this activity? Check out Inflexion’s full-page THINK document for more ideas.
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