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Adapting reflection into teaching
Teachers reflection essay
Teachers reflection essay
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Teacher Reflection and Evaluation
It is important in any career to reflect on your day, week, month, and even year. It is important to grow and improve yourself. Effective teachers know what to do and why to do it (Danielson, 2009). As a teacher you are faced with many problems throughout the day. It is easy to focus on just the problems that are going on in you classroom. It is easy to focus on Johnny’s behavior and complain about it to your co-workers. There comes a time that you need to ask yourself, “What can I do to help Johnny improve?” At this time you should sit down and reflect on what you have done and other objectives you can do.
Reflection is essential for growth. If one is just looking at a lesson, a child’s behavior, or one’s own actions, a teacher should always reflect. Reflection for a teacher should be at the beginning of the year, weekly or a few days a week, monthly, and most important at the end of the year. Having this time to sit down and have a deep thought process is good for the teacher to improve and grow.
Reflective Practices
A teacher has complex choices to make throughout the day. These complex choice cause a different type of thinking. In a way a teacher needs to use the Bloom’s model to reflect. One needs to start by remembering, then analyzing, and finally evaluating. Then the difficult parts of the reflection process the change. According to Danielson (2009), there are four models of thinking: technological, situational, deliberate, and dialectional.
Technological thinking is common knowledge that comes from an external source. This is information like daily routines, schedules, etc. This thinking is considered the effective and efficient thinking process (Danielson, 2009).
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...tuation and all possible outcomes. It is important to share your refection with co-workers (not every reflection).
Reflecting on lessons, professional, and self is essential. Reflecting should only take about 10-20 minutes. If you take time to reflect you will be impressed with your student’s improvement and your own improvement.
Works Cited
Bauer, G. (2010). Become a reflective practitioner, retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWnpsiwmups&feature=youtu.be
Brigden, D. & Purcell, N. (2014). Focus: Becoming a reflective practitioner. Retrieved from
://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/subjects/medev/Focus_Becoming_a_reflective _practitioner
Danielson, L. (2009). Fostering Reflection. In Educational Leadership, 66(5). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb09/vol66/num05/Fostering- Reflection.aspx
Reflection, as explained by Moon (2013), is the process of looking back on an event or experience and thinking about it and learning from it. Reflection, which is learning through experience, is not a new concept. As humans, we naturally reflect on our surroundings and experiences on a day to day basis in order to make sense of them. (Norman, Vleuten and Newble, 2002). In a professional context, reflation is vital for a practitioner to learn and improve their practice. By using their own experiences, practitioners are able to analysis, and in turn, adapt or improve specific areas of practice
Jay, J. K., & Johnson, K. L. (2002). Capturing compexity: A typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85.
One reason for Reflection being used is to give practitioners the chance to change an aspect within their setting, which they feel can be improved in order to help the development of children within their practice. Reflective practice is about improving practice and coming up with theories to support the improvement (Holmes, 2011, p.7). Reflective practice using critical reflection will allow the practitioners to identify what they do well and what they need to improve on within their Early Years settings. It can also give practitioners the opportunity to develop their professional identity, and work at improving their working environment (Forde et al, 2006, p.65, 66). By allowing practitioners the chance to improve their working environment, it can have a huge influence on the children and their development within the Early Years. For example, a teacher looking back and being reflective over their lesson, will allow them to make amelioration for when they teach that lesson again, thus leading to further learning development of the
Reflection is a key element of the human learning process. It can be used to justify aspects of practice and legitimise the knowledge gained from it, as opposed to traditional forms of learning.
Reflection is a process that begins with looking back on a situation thinking about it, learning from it and then using the new knowledge to help you in similar situations in the future. We need to evaluate through reflection to examine whether change is needed. We can then decide what action is needed and what we would do the next time we are faced with a similar situation. It might not necessarily be something you have done wrong, it may well be you were happy with the outcome of a situation you had some input into and would do again. It may have been something you did differently that had a positive result and
student. In the following journal, we see the benefit of reflective practice and what it achieves
As it mentioned above this reflective essay is based on the main theory on Reflection, which is the Honey and Mumford’s learning styles that was developed from Kolb’s work. This is based on four stages of specific styles of learning:
Learning the art of reflecting while an activity is taking place, or after it, is a skill that requires several steps of progression. Ultimately understanding the process of reflection can help coaches refine their coaching strategies and incorporate those strategies at each stage (becoming a better coach through reflective practice, 2016).
Especially since nurses in the course of their day-to-day work need to be able to act autonomously and make appropriate clinical judgements (9). Reflection can be of value in making sense of difficult situations, as it allows one to clarify the situation for themselves and the outcome is to have a changed perspective which enables the nurses to improve his or her clinical judgement (2). Thus why, it is imperative nurses engage in lifelong reflection which recognises its value for professional growth and development and improvement in the quality of patient care (7). The Gibb’s model of reflection, for example is a great tool that nurses can use daily to help improve these skills.
Reflection within early year’s settings and schools allows for the practitioner to think about the work that is being completed either whilst doing it or after it has occurred, the reflection allows for seeing how the work has gone or whether it needs to be changed for future practice. Schön is a key writer about reflection and illustrates the differences between reflection in action, reflection on action and reflection whilst completing the task. The above critical skills help all practitioners to develop understanding as they hugely impact on others lives, if this skill is not engaged in then practice could be effected (Leeson, 2004).
Along these two weeks we have been prompt to make a recall to our own way of learning and why we became a teacher: Was it because coincidence, due to life circumstances, maybe because family tradition, was it a conscious decision or because someone influenced us? Whatever the answer is, we have to face reality and be conscious that being a teacher does not only means to teach a lesson and asses students learning. It requires playing the different roles a teacher must perform whenever is needed and required by our learners, identify our pupils needs and preferences, respecting their integrity and individuality but influencing and motivating them to improve themselves and become independent.
The reflective dimension is the journey of self-development through a critical analysis of one’s thoughts, behaviours and values. Reflection allows you to relate your inner self to the environment around you. It encourages social responsibility and constant improvement as you learn from experience and acknowledge success. (Olckers, Gibbs & Duncan 2007: 3-4) Reflection can boost learning by stimulating awareness of our feelings and practices. This allows health professionals to cope with unfamiliar circumstances and conflicts.
For instance, I have learned that just simply reflecting on what I am seeing in the classroom is not enough that I have to comprehend and gain knowledge about the classroom in a more profound and meaningful way, such as relating observations to theories and psychology studies. Also I have learned to reflect more deeply on what is going on around me, not just looking at what is at the surface. I took notes during my observation. I tried to not only write what was happening, but also why it was happening and tried to convey any thoughts or feeling the students, teacher or myself had. Lastly, in my reflection, I improved my reflection skills by asking myself questions, such as, “what would I do,” “how would I do it,” and “how would I react?” Then, I would reflect back on what I had learned throughout the semester to see if I could find the most appropriate
Teachers face a lot of daily choice problems, such as, how classrooms and curriculums should be organized, how students' behaviors should be interpreted, how learning time can be protected, and others. Sometimes these problems seem to be so ordinary that, the teacher needs to solve the problem automatically. But in the teaching process there are also complicated choices about difficult problems that, if left unaddressed, often increase. These difficult choices call for teachers to engage in sophisticated reflection (including self-reflection). Expert teachers tend to adjust their thinking to accommodate the level of reflection a problem situation calls for.
As I reflect on my past assessment process, I realized how much my assessments have changed over the years. In my early years, I used tests for informational recall as my assessments. I felt these were appropriate guidelines in which I needed to follow in order to substantiate a student’s grade. Every assignment or tests was given a point value and then based on the amount of points, a grade was given. Every student’s assessment was exactly the same, and the assessments did not contain any subjectivity. I felt confident in giving the grade based on a valid point system. However reflecting back, I see that I did not include any performance-based assessments or individual learning styles in my early assessment. I also did not take into consideration the individual needs of my students. My assessment approach was awful. I am embarrassed that I use to assess students in this manner.