Your school year is officially over, which means that you can now look back at it and see what you need to change or improve on. Looking back on your year shouldn’t stop you from enjoying your school holidays- it should motivate you to make next year a success. Here’s why reflecting on your school year is so important.

Improvement

Looking back at your school year will help you make the necessary improvements. If you feel like your grades could’ve been better, you can make adjustments like finding better ways to focus or better study methods that work for you. Our High School Study Section is full of informative articles and resources to help you reach your study goals for 2021.

Solutions

You can’t find solutions to problems if you don’t know what those problems are. Reflecting on the school year will help you find solutions to some of the challenges that made your year a bit more difficult. If there were subjects that you didn’t understand or even enjoy this year, you can come up with solutions like getting extra lessons or changing subjects. If the biggest issue was friends and peer pressure, you can reflect on how to make new and like-minded friends.

Motivation

Reflecting on your school year shouldn’t make you feel demotivated. It should actually do the opposite of that, by motivating you to be better and make better decisions going forward. You can even find new and better ways to keep yourself motivated, such as using rewards or seeing the bigger picture when it comes to your academic goals.

Appreciation

You shouldn’t only look at the bad or difficult parts of your academic year. It’s important to take time to appreciate some of the good things, like all the subjects or extramural activities you’re good at. This is also a great method of self-motivation, which makes you realise that even though you stumbled in some areas, it’s not all bad.

Understanding

There’ll be moments where you question why you need to learn some things or why you need to do well academically. Doing some reflection helps you understand why your academics should always take priority. Over the holidays, you may be getting a lot of advice and questions from different people who’ve travelled the journey you’re on. Even that is a great part of reflecting on the school year, and it can also give you a clear understanding for why setting a good foundation at the start of the year is so important.

Reflecting isn’t always going to be easy. Sometimes you’re going to reflect and have regrets about how you could’ve done more, but you didn’t, and those thoughts are perfectly normal. But don’t be so hard on yourself. The fact that you’re looking back means that you’d like to identify the problems, find solutions and do better. That’s something to be proud of!