The research on how people learn continues to show the value in helping students make meaning and learn through reflection. The process of reflection helps students take a step back to carefully consider that they learned, absorb the information, and process what it means to them. Fortunately, fostering reflection in the classroom can be relatively quick and easy. In today’s post, I share a simple, but powerful reflection activity, Today I Learned, from my book Teaching for Learning.

Today I Learned IDEA

Overview

Today I Learned (TIL) is a guided reflection activity in which students are asked to respond to a single prompt: Today I Learned (alternately: what is the most important thing you learned today?). It provides students with a chance to order their thoughts and to identify something significant and important from the lesson. It helps them understand the relevance of a given session or assignment. And it provides the instructor with feedback on what students believe have gained from the learning activity. The activity is particularly flexible. It can be used in any discipline, and it takes only a few minutes to implement.

Guiding Principles

As Chickering and Gamson (1987)suggest, students need the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned. To reflect, students need a chance to act upon and process information they have encountered. Unfortunately they do not always do so naturally but instead need prompting. TIL provides students with the opportunity to make meaning of their experiences. It prompts students to reflect by synthesizing and evaluating information and what it has meant to them. To the end, this process deepens and strengthens their learning. It also provides the instructor with information about what students learned, and in turn what they did not. This invaluable information can help instructors make adjustments to their next activities to ensure that students have met the intended learning goals.

Preparation

Little preparation is needed for this activity. Simply set aside sufficient time at the end of class to either call on students or to have them respond in writing. For a small class, 5 minutes at the end of a session typically is sufficient time. For a larger class, a quickwrite on an index card is a good option for the activity.

Process

• Conduct the learning activity, whether lecture, discussion, group work, or other.
• Announce the activity, and set the parameters, including timeframe for responding and method of response (orally or in writing).
• Ask students to respond to the prompt “Today I Learned.”
• Collect the responses by having students state what they learned or collecting the written responses.

Pro-tips

Today I Learned is what is known as a “sentence stem.” Other stems can be substituted for this one, including the following as indicated on the Baylor Web Site in an article titled “Applying theory into the classroom”:

• Today I learned …
• I don’t understand …
• I would like to learn more about …
• I need help with …
• A question I have is …
• Please explain more about …
• The most important thing I learned today is …
• Three things I learned today are …
• The thing that surprised me today was …
• I am still confused about …
• I wish …
• The best part of class today was …

The term “Today I Learned” has been popularized on an Internet site (Reddit.com), but faculty for years have been asking students about what they learned in class. Some students might appreciate the reference to popular culture, while others might think it trivializes the activity. Gauge your audience to determine whether to use the TIL term when announcing this activity.