6. Reflective Practice
Reflective teaching is an important and necessary part of being an educator. This process includes examining how and why you are teaching, discovering areas of growth, and aligning these values and improvements with practical classroom experiences before, during, and after a lesson is given. It is important to rely on evidence and critical analysis of lesson plans, instruction, and student interaction to show effective teaching in the classroom is occurring.
DESE Proficiency Standard
"Regularly reflects on the effectiveness of lessons, units, and interactions with students, both individually and with colleagues, and uses insights gained to improve practice and student learning."
Through this process and in an education career, being able to reflect on one's own teaching performance is necessary to succeeding in this field. Understanding how to critique if a lesson, assessment, activity, or homework accomplished the goal you wanted it to is needed to be able to grow as a teacher and deliver quality instruction. In particular, as a student teacher I was able to practice reflecting on my teaching after each class with my mentor teacher. She would guide the conversation, asking me how I thought the lesson went including both what went well and what could have been better. Next, she would share her thoughts on how the lesson went, sharing recommendations on how to improve the format or instruction for the future. I was teaching the same class four times, which allowed me the opportunity to improve my lesson each time I taught it. Using the new ideas from each reflection session, I felt more confident each time I taught one of my lessons and I knew it improved every time. My program supervisor was also able to provide me feedback from a different and objective perspective during observations, giving me advice for both how to deliver the lesson and manage the classroom.
Comparing and Analyzing Data
An important aspect of my reflective practice was looking at each of my classes grades and understanding the differences and how it should impact my teaching.
In general the two class that I taught in the morning had much lower overall grades averages than my afternoon class periods. When discussing this with my mentor teacher, it was brought up that she had noticed this trend from the start of the year before I had joined the class. It was important of me to be aware of the trend during my teaching as the morning classes occasionally need more support with the content or redirection for their attention.
Through the use of pear deck I was able to notice trends in students and their participation levels. By following these patterns I was able to look out for specific names and make make reminders or discretely remind certain students to remain on task. I was also able to see how correct answers were, allowing me to reflect during the lesson and redirect if needed. When there were multiple students who were not understanding or writing the correct answer I would be able to quickly assess and reteach in a new way.
Personal Growth
One of my main areas of focus that I would consider my biggest area of growth was the way that I interacted with each class and learned how to bring each student into the lesson. When I first began this process I was unsure of how to increase participation without making students feel singled out. For the first week I would spend too much time standing waiting for a student to volunteer to answer, or would pick only a few of the students who would consistently raise their hand which was not fair to any of the students. I found the idea to use a playing deck of cards that each had a student's name to create a more random participation method that would keep students engaged because of the unknown order. This worked really well for me, and I found way that I could incorporate this method that made both me and the students comfortable with its implementation. I also tried many other methods such asking for one side of the room to answer, dividing students into groups or pairs to answer, having them select different speakers, and snaking around the room. I became better each day with using students names and getting to know who they were, which made all of these interacting more comfortable and I found ways to use it through out each lesson.
One example in which reflective practice was extremely important was in the creation and execution of a unit test. I had created a unit test that was 25 questions long which students had about 1hr 15 min to complete. However, my mentor teacher and I noticed that there were a significant number of students who were rushing to finish and the scores for those that had submitted were lower than expected. After this class, we went through the test and noticed that there were too many questions with long portions of reading involved which was likely the cause of both the extra time needed and the lower scores. I had not taken this into account when making the test, and assumed the 25 question length would work because it had for the entire year, however many of the other tests did not have the same amount of text to read. After reflecting, we created a system to grade the class that had already taken the test which gave them back points, and edited the test down to 20 questions for the other classes. After these changes, the following classes all scored much better and were able to finish with plenty of time, and the first class's grades were changed to better reflect their actual knowledge and effort.
Below are a few of my weekly reflection assignments:
Week 3 Reflection - Well-Structured Lessons (1).docxWeek 1 Reflection Questions (1).docxWeek 2 Reflection - Safe Learning Environment (1).docx