I was fortunate enough to have a very enthusiastic and supportive mentor teacher. After every class, I taught, my mentor, Mr. Chandonnet, and I sat down and "brain dumped" everything that went good and bad. He always had notes for my own personal growth from parts of lessons I was too busy to pay attention to and note down my self. We will brainstorm tips on classroom management, or the momentum of my lesson so that I can have a more fluid lesson next class. We also talk about ways I can connect with my students more on a personal level to build better relationships and in turn tailor a more personal learning experience to every student and every class.

I also attach a file to every lesson plan I taught titled "Notes for next time". Math or science teachers typically will have multiple sections of the same subject, meaning they get to teach a single lesson multiple times a day or maybe even a week. Though, as a technology elective teacher, I have multiple different subjects to teach, most of them contain only one section. This means for a majority of my lesson plans I only get one chance per year to teach them. This is why I carefully reflect after each lesson and write down everything that went good and bad, as well as any changes I think I should make in my "Notes for next time" document. This is also where some of the feedback from my mentor, Mr. Chandonnet, will go as mentioned above.

While personal reflection is pertinent to personal growth, experiencing the skills of other teachers and observing their classroom is an important tool as well. As technology teachers, my mentor and I often share similar mindsets for lesson plans and structure, but other teachers in other subject areas have a variety of skills not utilized or even known by myself that can be beneficial to use in my own classrooms. During my time at WRHS, I had the opportunity to observe 3 classes, a history class, a foods class, and a physics class.