portfolio // disposition 2 | reflection 1

“Candidates will exhibit behavior that demonstrates a belief that continuous inquiry and reflection can improve professional practice.”

// interpret
This disposition emphasizes the importance of constant re-evaluation of one’s work.  The world in which teaching occurs is not a static one; from year to year, day to day, or even between first period and lunch, all members of the school community can change drastically.  Effective teachers must always seek to understand the nature of this community and change their practice to best serve its needs.  Only through a recursive process of inquiry and reflection—directed both inward and outward—can beneficial changes be made.

// select
To demonstrate my own process of inquiry and reflection, I have included the following artifacts from my student teaching experience:

·         My own observation notes taken during the fall 2008 semester, before I began teaching myself.  [D2.R1.A1]
·         Two written reflections completed during the spring 2009 semester in response to my university supervisor’s observations of my teaching.  [D2.R1.A2 and D2.R1.A3]

// describe
In the fall of 2008, I began spending one day each week at Carrboro High School, observing my mentor teachers and the classes I would eventually take over from them.  Over the course of fifteen visits, I watched the operations of two honors-level English I classes and two standard-level English III classes.  Though not entirely certain at the time about what exactly I should be observing, I nevertheless took various notes about the content of lessons, students’ behaviors, and my mentors’ teaching strategies.  I used these notes to complete various assignments within the MAT program, and later referred to them during my own student teaching.

For the spring semester, I became a full-fledged student teacher at Carrboro High, taking on the teaching responsibilities for the classes I had observed.  Three times during this experience, Dr. Jim Trier (my university supervisor) sat in on my classes to observe my own practice and offer his thoughts.  For two of these observations, he asked that I complete written reflections in which I discussed my objectives for each lesson and how well I thought they were achieved.

// analyze
These documents are relevant to Disposition 2 because, quite simply, they chronicle my own process of inquiry and reflection.  My observation notes relate particularly well to inquiry.  They reflect some of my earliest thoughts that strongly relate to teaching in an investigative, academic sense.  In these notes, I took the first steps toward connecting the theoretical information from my university courses and the actual high school setting they discussed.  These notes also represent the precursor to the relationships I formed with my students.  In my observations, I begin documenting student behaviors and—more importantly—considering why they happen.  Overall, these notes are a kind of snapshot detailing a fumbling young teacher taking his first pedagogical steps, asking himself “Just what am I doing here, anyway?”

I began to form an answer to this question in my written work for Dr. Trier.  Writing these reflections forced me to carefully examine the way I had prepared and taught a given lesson, and prevented my experiences from quietly drifting into the recesses of memory after the bell had rung.  Moreover, these reflections were not simply a rehashing of the day’s events, a 50-minute play-by play; rather, they considered the vital issue of whether my objectives and my teaching practice were supporting one another.

The key commonality between my notes and reflections is their consideration of what went wrong.  It may seem negative or depressing to dwell on unsuccessful events—and this may in fact be the case if done to the extreme—but healthy consideration of failure is the only way practice can improve.  Without understanding what went wrong and why it did so, changes can never be made to correct it.  These notes and reflections, then, illustrate my concerted efforts to improve my teaching practice.

// appraise
I believe these documents were effective because they arrived at specific, concrete conclusions.  In my observation notes, I collected examples of effective teaching practices that I later assimilated into my own teaching—procedures for using journals in class, for example, or how to introduce literature through the use of an anticipation guide.  These notes also informed my classroom management as I watched my mentor teachers handle issues like disruptive or off-task behavior that arose in class.

I gathered even more specific feedback from my own reflections.  Through this focused writing, I considered the successes and failures of lessons I myself had designed and implemented, and made recommendations to myself about how to improve them in the future.  As a result of my reflections, I now know I need to improve my skills not only in purely pedagogical areas like classroom management and guiding discussion, but also with more practical concerns like preparing technology prior to a lesson.

Whatever the conclusion, though, the fact remains that I now have a greater body of knowledge to use in improving my practice than I did prior to the reflection process.

// transform
I feel little transformation, if any, is necessary for my reflective process in terms of content.  Instead, I will have to transform my own habits so that I continue to engage in this process.  During my student teaching, there were external motivators forcing me to do so—my grades, the responses of my professors.  Once I enter the profession, though, there will be no explicit demand for me to reflect on my own practice.  Instead, I will have to cultivate the reflection process within myself until it becomes habit.  These reflections may take a more informal form—journal entries, for example, or notes scratched on lesson plans—but they will remain a central part of improving my practice as a teacher.