Outlines debriefing strategies to help students organize, compare, classify, evaluate, summarize, or analyze an experience and determine its meaning. Discusses several possible activities leading to increased understanding, including writing logs, diaries, or summaries, naming themes, imagining alternatives, evaluating, role-playing, drawing,…

During a six-week methods course for preservice elementary school teachers, student pairs were asked to solve a problem and record their experiences in a dairy. Presented are the dairy entries of two students as they worked on determining the number of squares that can be formed on a five-peg geoboard. (MDH)