Reflection Journal 1- Teaching Practices Development
Insaf Yousef Turkmani
Effective teachers acquire continuous professional and character development, a process which takes place all the time as you are a teacher so teachers should be long life learners.It is not something you can stop and if you do , your students will go behind attaining the objectives with your strategies and methods which become old fashioned and not related to the continuous rapid development of the universe with its entities. This is mainly what I have learned in my education study. As an experienced teacher, I used to make plans but now I know what it means more and what it should hold.To be specific I learned to write measurable objectives holding action,condition and criterion and how I can use bloom’s taxonomy to vary my instructional part with its activities and assessment parts to make it more effective and conducive to effective teaching. Although, I used to learn my students how to learn and be independent, strategic learners throughout their lives without knowing that this is described to be the ultimate goal of teaching.
To plan, to present to learners, to assess and to evaluate effectively, you should have the characteristics of effective teachers. We talk about many of the characteristics that I used to have but the one that I improved is to give students voice more even I plan engaging activities but I see that I can give them more talking time than me so instead of me wrap up the summary, I started to ask three of students to come on stage wear my hat and sum up the lesson , another two to write the formative questions or stick them and ask other two to solve and explain.By this I prepare my students to be leaders especially that the characters always change and I mean to let all my students to be leaders which is part of affective hidden objectives,by this no child should left behind. Also, when we learned that teachers should be long life learners , I think that I have it especially that I learned every new technology which might help me in delivering info and let my students construct their knowledge based on videos, experiments, posters and gamification but as we discuss it, I learned that I should learn about students’ cultures where I have more than 5 nationalities in my classes since my school is an international and this knowledge lies under the umbrella of long life learner teachers which find their students interests for better engaging in learning.
For planning, I used to make plans for my lessons without preparing a rationale for the whole unit and for each lesson as well,so I have started preparing them and presenting them to my students by telling them where we use the knowledge and how it relates to their life so they can reflect. Also, I started to look at diversity as one factor that affects my plan so I started to use examples for all my students who are from different cultures. I used to think that after 8 years of experience, I can come to class with notes on pieces of paper and mental plans and this is my plan but I learned that this is never meant to be a plan.Before, I used to write the objectives without mentioning criterion of success but I started writing it and really it helps the teacher to reflect on their work more.
For instructional procedures in my lesson plan, I start to decrease the TTT( teacher talking time), so students do more which let them more engaging and construct their own knowledge and by this we are moving with the change of the global changing nature of knowledge from Rational to Empirical to Pragmatism which mentioned that we learn by experience. Also, I improve my students participation activities to hold more from bloom’s taxonomy level of cognitive thinking so I started to put more analyzing, evaluating and creating exercises so I prevent the only usage of understand and apply questions only and move to higher level of thinking so I encourage them to have critical thinking, deep learning and creativity. I let my students develop their metacognition while they evaluate their learning and encourage the creativity by asking for free math projects for each unit with 10% of math grade on them where they can make a play , powerpoint recording, presentation and I was impressed by their amazing usage of minecraft game to build numbers and explain subtraction, canova presentation and their personality development to have researcher character and to be independent strategic learners.
In this journal, I mention my teaching practice development in my character,lesson planning and understanding of my role to be guide and facilitator for my students to construct their learning in our learning community (classroom) where each one has a role in the learning process. To be honest I learned more , developed more and I will continue to learn and develop as well as I am alive, till the last breath. Also, I will try to reflect all that I know to my students as I learned powerpoint recording 2 months ago and this month, I received 10 projects recorded.
