Reflective Practice: Professional Development
I believe there to be no revelation without reflection. Therefore, throughout my Student Teaching semester, I carried around a daybook in which I was constantly writing. In fact, some of my students began telling me that this image of me with a daybook in one hand and a pen in the other is the image they associate with me. In my daybook, I observed student behavior and interactions. This was one of the ways I made informal assessments of student participation--writing down which students were working, which were talking, which were disrupting, etc.
I also used my daybook to reflect on my own personal interactions with students. I used my daybook as a place to step back and think about the relationships and interactions I have with students: things like what a specific student said to me, or how a specific student reacted, or even how a class as a whole reacted to something I did. In addition, I spent a large amount of time reflecting on what went well in my instructional time, what didn't go well, and how I can improve it. A lot of times, it was by processing in writing things that had happened in the classroom that led to revelations concerning ways I can improve as an educator and mentor. Everyday, my daybook provided me with a space to vent, to process, to reflect, to interpret, and to draw out new revelations.
These daily reflections were also how I dialogued with my advisor at Gardner-Webb University. I scanned all of my reflections onto the computer, and through a private site, my advisor Dr. Hartman and I were able to have conversations about the types of interaction, teaching, and learning I reflected on in my daybook. However, my daybook was not just full of information about my classroom, but also information for my classroom. I used my daybook to brainstorm, to plan, and to take notes when I went to meetings and conferences. For example, all of my notes from the National Writing Project Conference I attended at UNCC are in my daybook. Also, I recorded all my notes from the Alpha Chi National Convention in San Diego in my daybook as well. For more information about being a reflective practitioner and to see samples from my daybook, see the "Reflections" page.
