Reflecting on Reflection

I have learned so much about myself, the process of reflection, the role of feedback in teaching and communicating with peers and colleagues, student motivation, engagement, and how they all tie together. Throughout this class, I learned more about myself as a scientist, student, and teacher. As a scientist I learned that I enjoy exploring different possibilities and creating experiments to test my hypotheses. I grew as a student because I learned so much about the world around me, and also what's beyond just what's around me. As a teacher I was able to implement an inquiry based lesson successfully and learn from it what I should do differently next time. The process of reflection is constant. I am always wondering, "well how will this effect me, or those around me." I also think about what I can do to better myself, how I can improve my work, or what I can do differently for the next time. It's a long and time consuming process. Keeping a blog was probably the hardest thing to do for me in this class. I'm not in the habit of writing in a journal, and I had never had to keep a blog before. I honestly didn't like writing about every single little thing that happened, I believe that that took away from the independence a blog should have. If I could do it differently I would have like to keep a picture journal of my journey throughout this class, as I love to take pictures of my surroundings, or things that find interesting. Seeing a picture for me brings back more memories and thoughts then a passage about what I did in class that day does. The role of feedback in teaching is crucial. Without feedback, we don't know whether the lesson was successful or not, or whether the students really took anything meaningful from it. Feedback is how we improve our lessons and how we gear the curriculum more specifically towards our students. Communicating with our peers and colleagues enables us to go beyond what we can do on our own. Collaboration is necessary towards giving students a meaningful education. Feedback also helps us to motivate our students. By knowing that most of the boys like learning about bugs, or the weather, we can tie certain lessons into that topic. Feedback helps us learn about our students such that we can make the material more personable for them, allowing them to get excited about the material and eager to learn more. This task helped me to meet many of the INTASC and ACEI standards. Below are the exact standards I have met through my reflective practice.