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Home > Standard 9

Standard 9

Reflection
The teacher is a reflective practitioner who continually evaluates the effects of his/her choices and actions on others (students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community) and who actively seeks out opportunities to grow professionally.

Reflection

Reflection is very hard to avoid.  I think we reflect on our actions all the time, from the second something happens to even a few days later if it has affected us strongly.  With student teaching, I think it was imperative not just to reflect on what went well and what did not go well not just for myself but also for the students in that I could learn from what the students liked and what they did not like and formatively use what I had learned in order to improve my teaching and make class a more enjoyable and worthwhile experience for my students.  I kept a running journal throughout student teaching in which I would reflect on situations I encountered and what I was working on and why I was taking some of the approaches that I took.  This journal was interesting to read at the end of my term as a student teacher, and I think it will be useful in the future as well.  More informally, I also sometimes took notes on the back of my lesson plans immediately after a lesson and wrote about what went well and what did not.

Here is a specific example of where reflection worked for me.  I taught a theatre class, and I had a particularly difficult time at times getting them to participate enthusiastically in some of the games we would play.  Instead of getting upset or frustrated, I decided to survey the class to see what games they liked and what games they disliked.  I totaled up their responses and made a list of games that the majority of them liked, and I used that to build my lessons from that point forward.  I saw the benefits of this reflection (and student help) immensely as the students enjoyed playing the games that I knew they enjoyed.

Evidence

Throughout student teaching, I kept a reflective journal about what was working and what was not working in my teaching as well as discuss situations with which I had to deal.  My artifact for this standard is the last two entries of this journal in which I reflected on all of my previous journals and my student teaching experience as a whole.
File Attachments:
  1. lastjournal.doc lastjournal.doc
Author: Jill Kingsland
Last modified: 6/19/2005 1:23 PM (EDT)