Reflective Practice

The sixth element of the Candidate Assessment of Performance is 4.A.1: Reflective Practice. The CAP says to meet high expectations as an educator, you must “regularly reflect 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” (Massachusetts DOE, 2016).

This CAP element was imperative for me to be successful in my classroom during my practicum because I was a new educator. I would not have been able to perform the way I did in the classroom in the way I did without the feedback I received from not only my mentor teachers, but also the rest of the teachers on my team and my students.

In my practicum, I had two mentor teachers who had two very different prepping and organizational tactics, teaching philosophies and classroom management styles. Because of this, I was able to reflect on how I was running my classroom with two very different people which was super helpful. During the day, I had two prep periods one with Lori and one with Amy where we would discuss what I had done in my classroom that day along with what I was going to do in the future. This allowed me to ask about parts of the class that could have gone better as well as parts of class that I wanted to improve upon.

Besides the daily meeting I had with Lori and Amy, reflection on my practice happened after every interaction I had with a student or other person throughout the day. This was especially imperative in my low function class. In my AG1 class I had students who learned at all different levels, so I have to continuously be reflecting on how they learned in order to teach them more effectively. However, I would also reflect on how each of the students would respond to what I was saying to them. For all students, but these ones especially, the way you interact with them affects the learning.

One of my biggest struggles this year was after I graded my quiz which was the Measurement of Student Learning. I had chosen this quiz because transformations were a very long unit and I headed the entire unit from start to finish. Lori helped me with coming up with some of the desmos activities I had given the kids, but the majority of the planning was all me. I had made up activities, tool kit cards, reviews and transformation dance moves. Throughout the unit as well, I had given mini homework quizzes that the students did very well on and when we did thumbs up, down or sideways for understanding, the responses were usually positive. The overall average for this quiz across my two classes, was a 73% which isn’t bad but it could be better. However, when I broke it up by class, the average for one of my classes was an 81% whereas the other class had an average of a 66%.

As I looked at the differences between my two classes and thought about why one did better than the other I came to the conclusion that it was not that one of the classes had smarter kids, it was the management of the classroom. My class that averaged an 81, is usually quieter, asks more questions, is more engaged and I have had longer in class. The class that got a 66 was the second class that I took over so it took a little bit longer for them to warm up to me and they have always been harder for me to manage as a whole. There are more times I have to work harder at keeping them all in order compared to the other class.

As I reflect on this I think about how I used the same management tactics in both classrooms but they are two very different groups of students so I what works with one will not work with the others. If I could go back and change one thing about my practicum, it would be how I managed my lower scoring period of students in order to help them succeed more. I also encourage them to stay after with me verbally to the whole class but I could have tried to talk to kids more individually in order to see if I could have gotten them to stay after with me when they were struggling.

As a whole, I have reached a level of competency in my reflective practice. As long as you think about what you do in a day and see how it affects everyone around you and change what you are doing to better your classroom and your students, the change is the most important part, reflection is easy to reach competency in.