Evaluations

I was given so much great feedback throughout this quarter and I worked really hard to take it all into consideration and change to become a better educator. The main feedback I was given the first few weeks was being louder and more strongly spoken/confident.  This was something I really struggled with as I am naturally very soft spoken and changing something about myself that I do subconsciously is a lot more difficult than changing other facilitation strategies and purposeful actions. But I practiced what I would say and went over the lesson plans and what questions the students might ask by myself and by the end I felt more confident in myself and even though I felt like I was yelling I did a much better job being loud enough for the classroom and being heard by all the students. Another piece of important feedback I got was spending more time going over specific expectations, I had mostly just touched on the general ideas of respect and how to respect each other and our environment, but this led to students having some questions over what is and isn’t respectful/allowed and caused there to be more time spent redirecting instead of learning. I used what had been points of contention on previous field trips to dictate expectations that I added to the beginning of each field tip so that each one would go more smoothly than the last. I think that without so much feedback from my teammates and my own regular self-reflection I wouldn’t have improved so much in my facilitation by the end of it and I wouldn’t have gained a greater ability to reflect on my own growth points while still being able to recognize what I do well, something I have historically struggled with.