This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 213 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we'll take a look at a reflection tool for students called learning stories.

I think a lot of teachers would like to see their students be more reflective as learners,

really thinking about their own growth over time, monitoring their progress,

and setting personal goals for improvement.

This is the kind of practice we see in lifelong learners,

and it would be great to cultivate it in our students.

But if you usually end up spending all your time and energy just making sure you teach

your required course content, you probably find things like reflection often get left behind.

What can help is to have a system that regularly sets aside time just for reflection,

giving students a structure for looking back over their work and thinking about their growth.

In this episode, we will look at a system just like that.

It comes from my guest, Marcus Luther, a high school English teacher in the Pacific Northwest.

You might remember Marcus from episode 186 when he shared a fantastic lesson idea

for doing gallery walks with student poetry.

Marcus has come up with a system for students to regularly reflect on their writing progress

in a single document over the course of a school year, building each reflection on the one that came before it.

Since implementing this system, he's seen student reflections become deeper and more complex.

His students pay much closer attention to the feedback he gives them,

and he's gotten a much clearer picture of what students are actually learning from his teaching.

In his English class, he calls these documents the story of your year as a writer.

Used in any subject area, they could simply be called learning stories.

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