Deckchair

The Reflect Tool

With our sister company Appademic, we’re working closely with local schools to build online tools that help children learn better and succeed.

So far, we’ve created an online reflection tool with Gordano School in Portishead that helps students develop their core skills and prepare for course options, university and the workplace.

What problem was the school facing?

Gordano School found that whilst they had a lot of high-achieving students, when the students approached universities such as Oxford or Cambridge, their applications weren’t always successful because they couldn’t elaborate on their reasons for choosing a particular subject, university or direction. Essentially they weren’t reflective enough about the choices and decisions they’d made.

As adults more often than not this is a skill we’re capable of and use often in our work and personal lives to help us make decisions, but children need to learn this skill.

How did we help them?

By reflecting on what they’re learning students have a better understanding and become more articulate about what they have learnt. This has many advantages including:

• Clarity on options, higher education and work placement
• Students are more likely to be successful in university/work placement interviews
• Increased attendance of extended learning opportunities
• Self-assessment is at the heart of the Reflect tool, leading to students taking increasing responsibility for their own progress

With our online reflection tool (Reflect), students login outside of lesson time to create reflections about their work, other school activities and experiences they have had – essentially writing journals about what they did and learnt. For example, reflecting on a creative writing competition, the student would be prompted with questions matching the curriculum that help them realise and develop particular skills achieved from their experience.

The tool integrates social and peer-assessment elements as students can share reflections with other students, receive feedback and ratings – all of which create healthy competition, and increase engagement and output.

Gordano School have been using the tool for 12 months now and within the group of students using the Reflect tool there was a 50% increase in attendance of extended learning activities over the last year. This created such a buzz with other local schools that we decided to turn the software into a SaaS based product and market it to other schools.

Clevedon School have signed up for a licence of the tool for 2 years, and we’re really excited about talking to other schools and helping their students.