IPTS Standard 10 | Reflection and Professional Growth

The competent teacher is a reflective practitioner who continually evaluates how choices and actions affect students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community and actively seeks opportunities to grow professionally.

Artifacts:
CI403M Reflection
CI402M Reflection
Community Hours Reflection

My artifacts are three reflections to lessons taught in the field. The first reflection was an assignment for CI 403M: Teaching Diverse High School Students. The lesson was on slope in an Algebra I class. I wrote  pre-reflection before the lesson and a reflection after the lesson. The second reflection was an assignment for CI 402M: Teaching Diverse Middle School Students. The lesson was solving systems of linear equations. The third reflection was an assignment for CI 401M. For my community hours, I went to the Banneker club in Champaign once a week and played math games with 5th and 6th grade students. For the first two artifacts, I anticipated how each lesson would take place. I tried to anticipate possible challenges that would arise by taking into account specific students in my lesson. In each assignment, I reflected on my experiences afterwards and thought about how my choices and actions affected the students. I also thought not only about what I would do differently next time and what changes I could make, but what the strengths of the lesson were.

In each artifact, I take a look back and evaluate my choices and my actions to see how they affected my students. For my CI reflections, I went though my actions throughout the lessons and addressed what were good in terms of where we were in the lesson and what choices could have been better. I reflected mostly on my discourse with the students, because i felt that was where I needed the most improvement. For example, in one of my lessons I was running out of time and did not get to an important concept (the distinction between horizontal and vertical lines in terms of slope) that I had planned on teaching. Because of this, I decided that I should have spent more time on the change of y over the change in x and why we subtract these values. During the end of the lesson I was feeling a little discouraged by my progress, and afterwards I knew it was because I didn't go as in depth as I would have liked to. I realized I was fitting too much into one class period, and ended up planning the lesson for two different days instead of one.

Being a reflective practitioner is essential for teachers if they want to keep growing and developing in their career. I know that I will continue to learn from the decisions I make and from my students. From paying attention to my actions and thinking critically about the choices I make and why I make them, I can develop new information that will inform how I teach in the future. Reflecting upon lessons will be really beneficial, especially when teaching the same lesson throughout the day.