“We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” — John Dewey

The school year is over. Have you reflected on the year yet?

You’re a learner, right? We believe in life-long learning. We work in educational institutions, where learning is the mission of the organization. Learning is what we do. And reflection is a key component of learning, right?

We just finished this part of our educational journey we called the 2013-14 school year. So what did you learn? What did you accomplish? What were the biggest challenges? How did you fail, and what did you learn from those mistakes? What are the goals for next year, and how are you going to measure them? What do you still need to learn?

Now is the time to do this. Sure, summer is here. We want to be done with all of this academic work for a while. But now is the time to take stock of where we’ve been and what it means. A week ago, I sat down with a cup of tea and my notebook and reflected on the ending school year.  The process helped me outline some goals for next year, and some strategies for meeting those goals. On Friday, I updated our leadership team on the status of the technology plan (plan here, status here) that forced me to reflect on the accomplishments for the year, the challenges we struggled with, and the path forward.

Take a few minutes — before the year gets away from you — to reflect on what you’ve learned.

Photo credit: Anderson Mancini on Flickr.