A Spanish proverb says “More grows in the garden than the gardener knows he has planted.” If the classroom is a garden and your lessons are the gardeners, then teaching without reflection is the equivalent of never discovering how much you have planted. Being reflective allows me to grow as an instructor and as a person. I like to analyze my lessons so that I can plan for further instruction. When I analyze my lessons I look for how well the students grasped the concept, how fast they grasped the concept, and what method of teaching the concept most effectively engaged the students (i.e. visual model, media, movement, etc.). I also reflect on how comfortable I felt teaching the lesson and whether or not I would change anything if I had to teach the lesson again. By reflecting on these questions, I am able to then better support my students and their needs.

 

The area of my teaching that could use the most improvement is the ability to prompt students and ask thought provoking questions instead of leading questions. I have implemented strategies to improve in this area such as, having others observe me teaching, observing others teaching, and carefully planning lessons that encourage deep metacognition and reflection. I have shifted the focus from being about what the answer is to why the answer is the answer. The idea is to challenge students to understand how they think and provide them with strategies that they can use in the future to be successful when presented with an academic concept.

 

Many of my lessons do not go as smoothly as planned. This is not because they are ineffective, but because I try to remain aware of my learners and if I can see something is not engaging them I adapt and modify accordingly. I work with several students with oppositional defiance disorder and some days what I have planned does not work for them. I instantly have to modify the situation without losing control. I find what works best in those situations is giving the students a choice between two things that I want them to do. When they pick one they feel a sense of control because they are making decisions about their own education even though they are essentially doing what I needed from them for the lesson.

 

InTASC Standard 9: Professional Learning and Ethical Practice The teacher engages in ongoing professional learning and uses evidence to continually evaluate his/her practice, particularly the effects of his/her choices and actions on others (learners, families, other professionals, and the community), and adapts practice to meet the needs of each learner.

 

Description: The artifact I feel best represents Intasc Standard 9 is a lesson plan I prepared for a young group with two cognitively impaired students and one student classified as ECDD. In this lesson I taught the students about squares. I used squares that were the colors the students already knew to reinforce their known colors and as a way of introducing an unknown concept with something familiar to the students for easier processing. This artifact represents the standard in two ways; first, when creating the lesson I reflected upon what I knew about the students and their learning styles to create a lesson that would effectively engage them. Second, after taking advice from my mentor teacher and co-intern prior to the lesson to make it more effective, I taught the lesson, then reflected on what went well, and what I could/would do differently if I were to teach it again.

 

Artifact: Treasure Hunt Lesson Plan

 

Reflection: I have always been a reflective individual. I enjoy constructive criticism because it helps me grow. Over the course of my student teaching phases, I have seen tremendous growth in the areas of comfort in a classroom with a large amount of students, professionalism, and nurturing a healthy classroom culture. I pride myself on celebrating differences instead of isolating them. In the artifact I feel have showcased my growth in professionalism by being able to ask for help in planning the lesson. Some skills that I am still improving on are, working on prompting students instead of providing the answer, and scaffolding. I often push so hard for my students to get the right answer that instead of giving them the tools to grapple with new concepts independently, I become their crutch. I am working on planning my lessons so that it forces me to allow students grapple with new information and use their background knowledge to aid in their understanding of new knowledge.