Reflective Practice

A teacher candidate proficient in Reflective Practice "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."

Students change, classes change, technology changes, everything changes! Your instruction will always be changing to meet the needs of your students, to cover different content, and to be of higher quality. After each lesson you give, take a moment to consider what went well, what failed, and what could be improved and make a note of them — trust me, you'll forget very quickly. Using these notes alongside any other feedback to make adjustments to your lessons is important because there are always ways to improve. For example, maybe you discovered a new way to reach a student who gets distracted easily or maybe you tried something new but it didn't go so well. In both of these scenarios, you can use that information to inform how you construct your lesson plans for the next day, week, and year. It's imperative that you always consider the what and why behind your classroom plans.

Throughout my practicum, I made a deliberate effort to seek feedback from and have conversations with my mentor teacher about my lessons — what I could do better, more of, less, etc. This slowly became a regular practice for me and it became normal to think critically and reflectively about my time. I also maintained a journal for a portion of my experience where I put my stream-of-consciousness thoughts about how I thought I was doing and where I thought I could improve. Both of these practices helped me grow quickly as I taught more and more, as a continued to gain experience. In the future, I'd like to re-incorporate journaling because, as a routine, it is not only very healthy to get thoughts on a page, but it is a good way to see growth over time and document changes, goals, and self-advice before you forget it.

Reflection does not have to only come from within, data and student feedback can be reflected upon to modify existing practices. In the less formal sense, when I receive a verbal comment from a student like, "I wish you'd grade faster," it motivates me to make that change so students feel heard and their experience in my classroom is better. In addition, my student survey informed me of areas that my students saw as strengths and places for improvement. Assessment can also be a tool for reflection. My goal for the Intro to Programming unit for my 10th grade Exploring Computer Science course was to see a 10% increase between pre and post test scores across the unit. Even though that goal was not met, with the class average increasing by 8.27%, most students saw significant improvement between tests. Some students scores over 30% higher on the second test! I was also able to reflect upon the results of the assessments and consider improvements to be made. One conclusion that I drew from the data was that students need more time practicing program analysis to better cement in the more conceptual and abstract components of programming. Several of the questions on the assessment (designed by ECS) were designed in this manner and checked for understanding of concepts, how to use them, and how to catch and understand edge cases. If given the chance to re-teach this unit, I would add more assignments asking students to examine code and walk through how it works. This would give students a better understanding of the more abstract concepts and guide them towards becoming better programmers by exposing them to good practices.