Definition of "Reflection and Personal Development"
A teacher must be a reflective practitioner who continually evaluates the effects of choices and actions on others, including students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community, and who actively seeks out opportunities for professional growth. Teachers need to be good models of effective learners, both for the students and for the school community. An effective learner constantly monitors his or her performance in areas of interest and seeks to improve. When needs are identified, professional development provides targeted opportunities to learn new skills and foster new ideas.
Supporting Artifacts and Analysis
As a young teacher, I have yet to fully appreciate the cyclical nature of the profession with the opportunity to reteach and improve a course from year to year. However, because Byron uses a block schedule, I have had a second chance to teach two of the courses that I taught during my first semester with a new group of students. When going through a course for the first time, it was very powerful to have access to my mentor teacher's historical unit test data to see where the existing curriculum had holes that I could try to fix. After teaching a unit once, this data was even more powerful as it gave me a chance to compete with myself and improve from my own weaknesses. This artifact includes a historical data record from Algebra 2 and a reflection on the hard blow that I felt when two classes, both of which I was working hard on, came back with frustratingly low results. It was through careful analysis of the data, discussion with students, and discussion with my PLC that I realized where I could improve going forward. I believe that I am an effective innovator, but unless I direct my focus to the right problems, my time is wasted. Data is one key tool that allows me to focus my time innovating in areas that need it most to improve student achievement.
In real time, data provides an objective way to reflect on my teaching mid-unit and mid-lesson. Section quiz and daily quiz results, especially in my experimental new Statistics curriculum, drive much of the pacing of the units. I use real-time data in my algebra classes to decide what to focus on during group instruction in class (when the baseline instruction is coming from reverse-classroom videos). Beyond tests, I use survey data from all of my courses to also guide real-time changes. This was especially influential in Algebra 2 when I was generating new videos daily for two units.
http://wikieducator.org/Rapid_Teacher_Training:
In my senior year at Olin College, I created a wiki on "Rapid Teacher Training" to satisfy the requirements of my AHS (arts-humanities-social sciences) capstone project. Though I made up the phrase, rapid teacher training refers to programs like Teach For America's summer institute and other programs that give young people a crash course in teaching before sending them into the classroom. As someone who was passionate about teaching but didn't want to step completely out of software design, the prospect of such programs intrigued me. Most existing programs that I found had an intense summer training / orientation program followed by a year or two working as a teacher or tutor in a school. My goal was to identify the common threads or "secret sauce" that could be used by any organization to develop an effective training program for young teachers who didn't have time for or need of a traditional education in teaching. I found that most of the programs helped to build trust amongst the young teachers, taught the importance of planning, provided specific classroom management skills, and indoctrinated the group with the culture of the program or school, amongst a few other core things. Using these principles, I created a sample program tailored to a group of students on campus who ran an after school program at a nearby charter school. Ironically enough, I signed up for Winona State University's one-year teacher certification program, with a condensed summer set of courses and a year-long internship, a couple months after finishing this project.
Though I consider myself a quick learner with technology, the introduction of a set of iPads and Android tablets into the classroom left me unsure of how to best use the devices. Byron's technology director led a group of 5 teachers and 3 interns as we experimented with the devices with our students. The mobile device pilot was much more than an introduction of hardware -- it was a professional development opportunity as I learned what other teachers in our building and throughout the country were doing with the tablets. The face-to-face meetings and online discussions that went along with the pilot helped me develop new ideas for my own students, including a data collection and a video production project. Being part of this group also involved me in the discussion of what 1-to-1 computing might look like in Byron in the years to come.
Grand Challenge Scholars Program Portfolio
Before graduating from Olin, I build a reflective portfolio on undergraduate education and how it prepared me with a unique perspective to solve Grand Challenges in education. One of the most common questions I get when people learn about my engineering degree is "why are you teaching?" This portfolio is my best response to that question. Throughout my time at Olin, all of my experiences pushed me on a track to ask the big questions about how and why we learn, what role a school serves in the community, and what technology can do to push closer to the utopic vision that all kids can be engaged and learning. Specifically, these early experiences include a student-generated course, a year off of school to start an educational software company, and being a founding teacher and curriculum developer for a weekend engineering program for high school students. It also ties in the role of my major (software engineering), service learning (teaching and tutoring locally), and global development work (including teaching internationally).
Synthesis
Reflection is a key skill for all people in a school -- students, teachers, and administrators. Reflection requires an individual to temporarily detach from their situation, objectively measure how they are doing in relation to their purpose, and decide where to go next with that new knowledge of self. By frequently reflecting, you can more effectively update your goals to match a changing situation and adjust your approach to reach them as quickly as possible. Data, from formative assessments, summative assessments, and surveys, helps the frequent reflector by providing an objective measurement of the present situation for the entire class, not just the perceived situation as presented by a smaller number of individuals. Professional development is the timely action that follows reflection. When you discover gaps in your approach as a teacher, training on new instructional strategies, technologies, and ways to manage the classroom become relevant and helpful instead of time consuming and uninteresting. Professional development can also be a source of inspiration to try new things or look for new opportunities where a need had not been obvious before.