Reflectiveness

Reflection is one of the most important actions a student or teacher can execute before, during, or after school. As a student, I catch myself multiple times going through the days and not retaining anything from the school day. I believe many students don't take the time to mentally step back from their busy lives and analyze their day(s). A lot of important moments can be forgotten if individuals don't recollect them. Going through your whole day once a night (reviewing notes) can have a huge impact on retaining information for the future.
I believe both students and teachers find it hard to reflect because they're so busy and preoccupied with something other than school. Taking small moments away from each day will not only make tomorrow better, but it will make you appreciate the little things. Students have a hard time reflecting, I believe, because the lessons in classrooms aren't applying to students life (or the students fail to see the application to their lives). Because of this, students sub-consciously don't see the point of reflecting on it. Typically, individuals reflect on something important that has happened to them. Not enough students are not seeing school as important, therefore not reflecting on it. And teachers aren't realizing enough that students don't see the importance because they're not reflecting themselves.
Reflection can be argued as the heart of the teaching process because it requires the individual to recollect on the information that was given to them. You can't look over a lesson once and expect to get an A on a big exam. It requires reflection on the material. Most of the time when you reflect, you answer questions in your head that you never thought of. Students worry so much about a letter grade that they forget to apply whatever they learn into their lives, then they eventually forget it. Encouraging students to reflect will make them into strong, critical thinkers and that will play into almost every element in their youth and adult lives. Having students become individual thinkers is the main goal for most educational institutions, isn't it?
Reflecting effectively is really up to how the individual wants to handle it. But I believe the most effective way is to let the individual just think by themselves. Have no outside voice influence their thought. Let students go and have them think of original thoughts. Have them write down what they think (like I'm doing right now). This expands the brain to think of things that it might have never thought before (creating new opinions and answers). I also see reflecting being done with other people involved. Talking about something will bring in other opinions and will eliminate others. Sometimes hearing an outside opinion can make you reflect upon your own.