reflective writing prompts middle school

reflective writing prompts middle school

The Importance of Reflective Writing in Middle School

1. The Benefits of Reflective Writing

Developing emotional awareness with young adolescents, enhancing metacognition, identifying learning preferences, promoting decision-making, fostering brain research, and developing emotional awareness with young adolescents are all important aspects of education. Helping students recognize and understand their emotional responses to specific situations is crucial for their emotional development. Keeping a journal of events that triggered strong emotions enables students to track patterns over time. With this information, they can identify both positive and negative influences in their lives. By understanding the circumstances that led to both desirable and undesirable outcomes, students can learn to repeat or avoid those circumstances in the future. This process is pivotal to the decision-making and goal-setting stages of reflective thinking, providing a rich source of information for understanding behavior and making improvements.

2. Promoting Self-Expression and Critical Thinking

Middle school students need opportunities to reflect. By confining writing to other than the reflective, I’ve stifled my students. Who likes to write about what he disliked about his report card and how he’s going to change? But even 11-year-olds can benefit from thinking about their thinking, without which cognitive learning is necessarily shallow. Most important in promoting cognitive development is nurturing higher order thinking, and writing is one of the best methods to provoke thought processes. The most enjoyable way to do that of course is by creativity through stories or poems where thinking, or imagining, must occur. But expository writing can also be an enjoyable experience when a personal element to the topic is added, something greatly affected by the comfort level with writing. Rich Bailey makes a good point that “self-expression is at the heart of effective communication” and that “students don’t usually lack ideas, they lack the confidence to express them.” This problem is not just for language learners, students of all races often experience difficulty expressing ideas on paper. Through reflective writing students can 1) gain confidence in self-expression 2) make a conscious effort to organize ideas coherently 3) bolster skills for communicating to an audience. What makes a critical thinker is a critical mind and reflective writing can lead students to question both the intangible and tangible, analyze and assess information, and problem solve to the best remedy. By doing so students are taking a deeper look into themselves, their culture, and the society around them, thus reflective writing is also a key to teaching diversity and understanding at any age level.

3. Developing Emotional Intelligence through Reflection

Leave a gap of a few weeks between the first and second telling of the story. It is important that the person gets some time to think over how they actually felt about the event before the second version of the story. This then shows how reflection on an emotional experience can give a greater understanding of a complex and often fleeting thing.

Discuss a situation where a person has felt some strong emotions – it may be a book or film, a bereavement or some other experience. Have the individual recall what happened, making sure they recount the facts of the situation. You must make sure that the event is not too personal or painful to the individual right now. Then ask the person to retell the same story, but this time recount how they felt during the event. Discuss the difference in the two tellings and how the person felt at the time and able to explain it in the second version of the story. This is a good lead up to looking at the different manifestations of an emotion and how one is able to reflect on how they have felt and the reasons for feeling that way.

Keywords: Empathy, happiness, sadness, Emotional literacy, self-awareness

4. Enhancing Communication and Empathy Skills

When we talk about the ways reflective writing helps to enhance communication and empathy skills in middle school children, there are many avenues to consider. In particular, one teacher in the study by Strong, Silver and Robinson (1995) mentioned that it was easier for her to discuss more personal issues with children when they had written about it first. They refer to specific instances in the classroom where the children were given an assignment helping another person, one child chose to write a letter to a younger student in the school. Through the process of writing the letter, he began to understand and articulate his reasons for choosing the specific student and through the teacher’s prompts, to empathize with the student and discover his own feelings on the matter. He decided to spend time with the child and write in a journal about the experience. This reflective journal became part of the criteria used to assess whether the assignment had been successful. This student’s ability to reflect on his feelings and the ability to discuss it with the teacher helped to develop and articulate his empathy for another person. Reflective writing can help to develop an understanding of empathy and assist children to articulate this by identifying feelings of another and discussing how their own actions may affect the feelings of the other person. This understanding is vital in developing good communication skills and the ability to problem solve in a non-violent manner. Written expression and language mastery are cited by Langer and Applebee (1987) as both being significantly and positively influenced by the use of reflective writing. High quality expressive writing requires careful word selection, the ability to create coherent, complex sentences and the articulation of informative and imaginative ideas. Creative and imaginative word expression can aid children to formulate ideas and concepts through concrete words and better explain to another person an internal issue or an issue involving another person. Word selection involving understanding and employing words with emotive content can assist in identifying feelings of self and others. A study by Elbot and Fulton (2002) shows an example of reflective writing helping a child to better understand his feelings of anger and disappointment in a non-violent manner. This word selection and the discussing of emotive content can greatly enhance the ability to communicate and understand feelings to another person. Better articulation of ideas through complex sentences allows children to convey thoughts and feelings in a detailed manner and finally, the ability to explain ideas or reflective questions involving issues with self or others can greatly develop the child’s competency in explaining and understanding empathy and communication.

5. Fostering Personal Growth and Self-Awareness

Reflection provides a way for individuals to become aware of their growth, to look back at the steps that were useful and ineffective, and to examine the ways they have learned and developed. Personal assessment and self-evaluation are fundamental on the track towards becoming lifelong learners. And it has become clear that reflection is a most powerful and effective tool to make this happen.

As they ponder the meaning and significance of events in their lives, students are often surprised by the new insights they have and the new understandings they have formulated. When students maintain a dedicated writing space for daily or weekly reflections, they are now more easily able to track their own changes over time and easily recognize patterns of growth and development. The concrete evidence they now have will no doubt help them see the changes they are going through and will demonstrate to them that change is a slow process. Without the presence of a dedicated space and a designated time frame, it would be much harder for students to track their changes. And without the evidence of reflection, the changes might go unnoticed.

Reflections, in comparison to other types of writing, such as persuasive or expository essays, encourage students to become aware of their feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Some students may not think about the things they are learning from the classroom in their lives. Reflection helps students thoughtfully work out a subject, task, or experience. It enables them to sift through what they have learned, what they may need to learn more about, and what the whole experience means to them. Reflection also offers students a way to make sense of the confusion or struggle that may have occurred, often fostering a sense of self-awareness and personal growth.