Chapter 10 Grow Professionally: Teaching Reflection

• Reflecting and Growing in through Lesson Plan
• Grow Professionally
• Closing Notes

Reflecting and Growing in through Lesson Plan

The most successful, highly effective teachers are reflective practitioners.  Following the teaching of your planned lesson, you will reflect upon your instruction and experience.  You will do so with the educator who observed your lesson (instructors, university supervisor, field placement faculty, and/or cooperating teacher).  This is an extremely valuable opportunity in which to receive constructive feedback that, if acted upon, will positively impact the planning and execution of your future instruction.

In a teacher preparation program, it is strongly recommended that you videotape yourself as you instruct students.  This provides powerful insight into your teaching practices and habits.  It allows you to observe everything from your body language to your verbal language, as well as interactions with students.  It enables you to monitor your effective implementation of professional instructional practice.  As a result of reflection you are able to identify an area for growth in future lessons.

You are additionally expected to reflect in writing following your observed teaching, referring to effective documented evidence of your student’s progress in planning the next steps in your students’ learning.  You’ll reflect upon the processes used in your instruction and the classroom environment.  You’ll note what went well and determine an area of your teaching to focus on in the future (Professional Responsibility).

License Lesson Planning 101 Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Kolling and Kate Shumway-Pitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Grow Professionally

As teacher candidates are prepared to enter the classroom, growing professionally is important.  It is important to know that teaching is a lifelong process and one can get better at doing something by doing it, evaluating, and reflecting on their teaching practices to grow.  In this continuous improvement process to become a better teacher today than yesterday, you must make sure that you are aware of any state guidelines for your professional practice and development. In the state of Florida, educators must use the Florida Educator Accomplished Practices (FEAPs) to guide their professional improvement. These guidelines were established by the Florida Department of Education. You can find more information on the FEAPs at:https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/professional-dev/the-fl-educatoraccomplished-practices.stml.  

Reflection

In order to find the best ways to improve your teaching practice, regular reflection on the challenges of teaching, the success (or failure) of students, and the choices you made before, during, and after teaching a lesson must become an integral part of your practice. Effective reflection is a deliberate, meaningful, and structured review of information in order to improve professional practice.

Reflection involves looking at student work to determine the efficacy of your instruction.  It’s a process of self-observation and self-evaluation.  Reflection comes in many forms, including:

• collaborating with colleagues
• analyzing student work
• audio/video recording of teaching to capture the moment-to-moment process of teaching written accounts of experiences (journal writing, blogging, self-reporting)
• peer observation can provide opportunities for you to view other colleagues in order to expose yourself to different teaching styles and to provide opportunities for critical reflection on your own teaching

License: Lesson Planning 101 Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Kolling and Kate Shumway-Pitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Closing Notes

This chapter closes the book on the materials that we strategically selected for teacher candidates enrolled in teacher preparation programs at the University of West Florida; specifically, for the course Planning and Curriculum.  We authors reflect on the teaching process as we introduced at the beginning of the book that teaching is a reflection process.  We selected these materials by reflecting on our experiences working with teacher candidates.

Nguyen: a faculty member who taught teacher candidates in teacher education programs courses:  from Planning and Curriculum, Mathematics Methods, and Field Experience. For Miller: as a former assistant principal who worked directly with teachers and saw the challenges that new teachers faced in planning to teach the curriculum.  We both have curricula that we plan, implement, assess, and reflect on, as demonstrated in the Figure.  We hope that readers find these materials useful to help teacher candidates as they prepare for the actual classrooms.