The purpose of your education portfolio is to capture moments of professional growth generated from your program.
The purpose of this course is to help you author a moment of professional growth into your portfolio.
The purpose of this task in the course is to help you reflect on your identified moment of professional growth to capture why it is important to you and your development as an educator.
So far in this course you have selected a moment of professional growth that is meaningful to you and your development as a teacher. You have described the context and selected an artifact that is representative of the moment. Now is the time to describe why you selected this moment and how you specifically grew as an educator. Here is an example:
The first unit I ever created was a collaborative unit plan where myself and three peers created a single unit plan to be taught in a classroom with some students with identified learning needs. This unit plan was important to me and my development as an educator because it was the first time that I had thought about the needs, abilities, and interests of the students before I thought about how I wanted to teach the lesson. It was my first time putting the students first!
Also, this moment was important because I needed to lean on the experience and expertise of my peers because some of them knew the students better and some of them knew the content better. If I would have tried to do all the tasks that we needed to do to be successful (which is how I had previously operated when doing group work) then the unit, and the students, would have suffered. I learned a valuable lesson in the power of collaboration with others in order to be a better teacher.
In the example above, I identified and explained two reasons for why the moment was important to me and my growth as an educator. Each paragraph represents a reason. This is similar to the type of reflection we want you to do for your artifacts. Consider the reasons for why you selected the moment of professional growth and flesh out each of those reasons into a paragraph to then include on your artifact page.
To capture your reflection on why this moment of professional growth (and representative artifact) is important to you and your development as an educator, execute the following steps:
Open your Chrome Web Browser.
Log in to Google Drive using your @go.olemiss.edu email address.
Open your Education Portfolio
Locate the the artifact page you worked with in the previous task.
Insert a paragraph for each reason why you selected the moment of professional growth.
You have reflected on your identified moment of professional growth and captured the reasons why it is important to you and your development as an educator.