Standard 8: Reflection and Continuous Growth

The teacher is a reflective practitioner who uses evidence to continually evaluate and adapt practice to meet the needs of each learner.

One of my strongest skills is self-reflection. My intrapersonal intelligence has increased my ability to alter my perceptions, including biases, as well as my teaching methods.  I’ve always believed that in order to understand the world, one must first understand oneself. My keen interest in studying social psychology is undoubtedly linked to my personal goal of understanding how I fit into the world, and why certain social events occur. I believe that a quality educator constantly reflects in order to improve her practices. My experience as a student teacher required improvement due to my initial novice experience. Reflecting on lessons or circumstances that happened during my student teaching and methods placements aided in my growth as an educator and as a human being.  

While working through the English Language Arts unit, “Who is the wolf in fiction?” I found that my planning of daily tasks was slightly skewed from what the students could accomplish. On the other hand, my previous unit on opinion writing proved easy to jump from one activity to another. The reason for the discrepancy, I later realized after many weeks of self-reflection, was because the new ELA tasks required higher-level thinking. The higher level thinking tasks that were somewhat more open ended in my “Who is the wolf in fiction?” unit required lessons that built upon each other. After I realized that my daily goals needed to be more flexible, I began writing multiple lessons for each objective. If my students were able to complete the task and show competency through their work and their words, I would then continue. If the students were unable to understand the newly introduced concepts, I could then explore the objective through another lesson.

The final and summative objective of my wolf in fact unit required that students write a narrative story using concepts from the text read in class. Although the ELA reading program objective was to write a narrative story, I altered the summative assessment into a narrative letter from the point of view of the wolf.  I altered the assignment because I had learned through reflection that the students had a hard time writing stories that were not about themselves. The letter had certain constraints that required students to use sequence and details from the text to support their views. In order to write the letter, the students had to imagine they were the “wolf.” The students had many opportunities to make story maps and organize story sequences for over five books. The student work showed how effective I was at providing adequate support and instruction. The students had the opportunity to explore narrative folktales through an explanation of the elements of a narrative story, and character traits and motives. I was able to assess my effectiveness based on daily formative graphic organizers and authentic assessment during class discussions.

After reflecting on the wolf in fiction unit I now know how to write a unit in an approachable and developmentally appropriate way. I also know that some students may need more scaffolding than is originally written into a ELA BASAL reader. Considering letter writing is an ELA core standard that is (suppose to be) learned prior to 3rd grade, I thought that the students would experience little trouble writing in letter format. After reflecting on the experience of the final assignment, I understand that assuming students know how to do something simply because the common core may state that they should have learned something is incredibly naive.