Reflective Practice

According to DESE's Candidate Assessment of Performance, an educator is deemed proficient in reflective practice if they "regularly reflect on the effectiveness of lessons, units, and interactions with students, both individually and with colleagues, and use insights gained to improve practice and student learning."

Reflective practice is incredibly important to me. I tried to use brief formative assessments throughout the day to gauge how well my students were absorbing the material. I kept note of what examples took too long or what concepts students seemed to grasp quickly. I was lucky to have two periods of Algebra 1, so I would be able to refine my lesson in-between periods after I had already taught it. Thankfully, due to the new schedule, I would have period 3 before period 1 half the time, so period 1 wasn’t constantly getting unrefined lessons.

I would always have my mentor teacher check over my lesson plans and activities. In the beginning, I often made my assessments too difficult, so I had to adjust them. My mentor teacher was always excellent in giving advice, and I learned a lot about the value of professional peer feedback.

ST PreCalc Rough Outline.pdf

To help with my pacing, my mentor teacher and I made a "rough draft" of what my lessons would look like. This document also allowed me to reflect on how long certain topics took. I would make adjustments in bold. I know now that some lessons take much longer than I expected! I plan on using this pacing as a reference for my future classes. Although no two classes are the same, I would rather plan for a lesson to take a little longer than speed through and not have enough time to cover everything.