Cisco Systems CCNA 2 manual Journals and reflection

B.5.2 Journals and reflection

An effective evaluation practice for students is to write in journals and reflect on academic experiences. Students can document their individual learning process and highlight important concepts. A learning log asks students to document their learning steps and indicate what is clear, what confuses them, and what they would like to learn more about. This provides important information about how students interact with, and process, new content. Instructors can determine if students are satisfied with their program and motivated to continue. Journals are self-reflective and encourage students to reveal personal thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Some students may choose not to share this type of information. If instructors decide to practice this type of assessment in their classrooms, there must be clear communication between the instructor and the students about the purpose of this activity.

The teaching and learning environment is strengthened when instructors and students take time each day for reflection. Metacognition occurs when people think about their thought processes. This can be done through written, verbal, kinesthetic, or musical activities. Reflection is an important tool to develop new comprehensions about the world. When students ask essential questions about their learning experiences, they can improve their information processing skills and become better problem solvers and communicators.

Journals provide a space for inner thought and reflection on experiences that occur in the teaching and learning process. Instructors that incorporate journal writing into curriculum will usually set aside a period of time for this process. The teacher and students can use this time to reflect on completed tasks or make predictions about future experiences. Thoughts and ideas can be written down in a dedicated, personal paper space or in a word processor file. These thoughts can take many forms such as words, sentences, illustrations, maps, charts, magazine pictures, and newspapers. Journal entries can take the form of guided or free-style writing. Through this type of reflection, teachers and students can track their comprehension of issues and themes over time.

Academy instructors may want to instruct students to keep a technical or engineering journal to record details about all aspects of their network design and installation experiences. This may not seem important at first. However, it will help students develop a habit that will become more important as they increase their networking experiences. These journals are usually paperbound composition books in which pages are dated and added, but never removed. The entries would include things such as daily reflections, troubleshooting, details, procedures and observations, equipment logs, hardware and software notes, and router configurations.

Student reflection is an important element of instruction with limited time requirements. The process helps students analyze and become more responsible for their learning. During reflection, the students think about an aspect of the lesson and write a reaction in the study guide. This internalization of learning helps the students set goals and make sense of the learning process. It also links prior learning to present and future learning. The reflection process helps students analyze and synthesize new comprehension. Students use the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation to move learning from short term to long-term memory. After each lesson, students should reflect on one or more of the following categories:

•Content

•Product

•Process

227 - 238 CCNA 2: Routers and Routing Basics v3.1 Instructor Guide – Appendix B Copyright ♥ 2004, Cisco Systems, Inc.