Individual and Collaborative Reflective Practice
As
far as individual reflective practice goes, this is an area I find difficult,
and I will discuss this more in my later section on the challenges I face in
teaching. For collaborative purposes, I am the only teacher at my school who
teaches my specific classes, so it is difficult for me to engage in
collaborative reflective practice. I have really enjoyed working with my
department members on areas other than specific units, however. Over the past
few years, we have worked to implement a scaffold for historical writing that
allows our students to build their skills each year, culminating in their major
International Baccalaureate papers (if enrolled as an IB student) or seminar
paper (if enrolled in the Matteo Ricci seminar program). We have compared
techniques and requirements that we each use in our individual classrooms to
create an essay that we can modify to fit different expectations for each grade
level.
First and foremost, Forest
Ridge is also a Sacred Heart school, and the schools are each on a 5-year cycle
of reflection network-wide. We are in the midst of the second year of our
current cycle. Last year we met several times as a whole faculty and staff to
celebrate the ways that we are living out the goals and criteria of the
organization, and to discuss ways that we might be falling short. This was
rendered into a document that will be sent to the Sacred Heart network, and we
will be evaluated. This year the high school at Forest Ridge meets to do the
same with the IB program. There is an intentionality to how we run our
programs, and this is facilitated by having an interim head of high school. We
are questioning each aspect of our school community, and it is inspiring me to
think about how I run my classroom.
Personal Strengths and Challenges in Teaching
I
think that my strengths in teaching are my enthusiasm for my subject and my
rapport with my students. Working at an all-girls school, and being just under
a decade removed from high school myself, I find it easy to relate with my
students and to balance professionalism with a sense of caring and fun. One of
the reasons I became a teacher is because I find joy in sharing my knowledge of
history. I hear from so many people that they hated history class- and I can
understand why because it is very easy to turn history class into a march
through time. I love the scenic detours of personal stories, and I help my
students see this through research projects and my own experiences. I have the
good fortune to be relatively well-traveled, so I can share what it is like to
visit some place you have learned about in history class, and the incredible
feeling you get when everyone else is staring at the guidebook and you already
know why this place or painting is so important. I have had several students
come back from summer vacations after going to Greece or Italy or somewhere
else we studied in 9th grade Western Civ class and share how much they were
able to connect my class to the actual place.
A
place I feel challenged in teaching is my reflection and lesson design skills.
While I always start out with great intentions, and I do tweak lessons that
failed miserably, I know that I could be much better about changing small
elements of lessons to make them better. Sometimes when I end a lesson that I
feel didn't come out quite right, I feel lost because I don't really know how I
could make it different, and I'm not sure where to go to get better resources
or ideas. This leads into my challenges in lesson design. While I try to hit on
different strategies and techniques to better engage all students, I know that
I tend to get stuck in the way my brain works, and I sometimes struggle to
modify lessons. I try to get students to tell me how their brain works and to
encourage them in that direction, but I would like to be more intentional about
it myself and better modify my lessons. I look forward to finding resources
that will help me in these areas, and also about standards-based grading. This
is an area of interest for me because I think that standards-based grading
helps both me and my students to be more intentional about the work that we do
in and out of the classroom.
Understanding of TPEP Framework (Danielson)
I
have very little understanding of the Danielson Framework, nor do I know if it
will be the framework used by my school going forward. Beyond my student
teaching, I have never worked at a public school, so I am unfamiliar with a lot
of the current standards and practices that schools in public districts deal
with. My experience with teacher evaluation has been for administrators to drop
by my classroom at various points in the year to give me some feedback on
whatever they happened to observe. At the end of the last school year I
received an "annual snapshot" that gave notes in three areas:
Teaching and Learning, Community/Professional Responsibility, and Leadership. I
feel like this hits on three of the
Danielson areas: Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional
Responsibilities. However, this wasn't very useful to me on a day-to-day basis
as I planned my lessons and assessments. Throughout the course of this class,
and this program at SPU, I hope to become a more reflective and informed
teacher so that I can back up what I "feel" to be good or what seems
to be working in my classroom with actual evidence.
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