Reflection

Reflection is a significant thing for teachers to do. It is important because it helps to collect and record everything happened during the lesson. It supports me as an educator to think about every specific thing that happened during the class. As a teacher, I prefer to reflect on my teaching to check on what happened during the class well, what needs to be improved, how can I develop things and what things must not be in my teaching. During my teaching practice, I did reflect on my teaching after every lesson I taught or after an activity I gave students even if I didn’t taught the whole lesson and I just helped on what MST were doing. Once, after I taught a lesson when I was observed by my MCT, I had to go to her after the class. Then I had a lesson to be in so I couldn’t reflect on my teaching that day after the lesson. It was hard to me to think and remember every specific thing about what happened during the class and how. In my opinion, the best time to reflect on directly after the lesson when teaching is still remember everything happened during the class. In addition, there are different things may have done to develop my reflection. Firstly, I can ask my MST to give me a feedback about my teaching. This point will help me to see some good points or either not well ones I may not focused much on. Secondly, search about examples of writing reflections. This can help me to have different ideas and different styles to write my reflection depending on what I have done.

Example of reflection about one of the lessons I taught:

I taught a math when I was observed by my colleague. I liked how the lesson was because I saw that students were engaged with the activities more than the previous times. All of the students learned about the shapes but not all of them, I think it takes time for students to learn new shapes and recognize these shapes. Students had different activities to focus on, so when someone didn’t learn any shape he had another activity to do which was helping students more in recognizing 3d shapes. For example, students had a playdough to make different 3d shapes such as pyramid and cube. Students were trying to make different shapes in the same activity. They were engaged during the activity. At the beginning, some of the students were saying for the cube, a square, but then I explained the different between the 2d and 3d shapes for them. Moreover, I was observing students during activity time and I asked them questions about the shapes and what they are doing. With searching about 3d shape activity, students had to search about 3d shape and take a picture of it using their iPads. One of the students was searching about the shape and I was observing him. He went to the 2d shapes pictures and he took a picture of the square. I asked him later if he found a shape and which shape is it. He was still confusing between 2d and 3d shapes. This thing told me I need to improve my objects for teaching on the mat so students can learn better about the difference. I may have real 2d and 3d shapes to show students, not only a video. I have changed the time from an activity, because students were having different enough activities I forgot about the activity I wanted to do on the mat during activity time. I let students to do this activity at the end of the lesson and it was helpful and students got the idea better because the activity was sorting 3d and 2d shapes in their correct place. For future, if I had the same the lesson for the same group of students, I would like to have a hard object from 3d and 2d shapes to help students learn better the differences between these shapes.

Week 3

There are two kinds of assessments that I’m going to talk about. Starting with formative assessment, it means checking on student learning to give them ongoing feedback. This kind of assessments is useful for both teachers and students, which can let students know about their learning and get them a chance to improve their learning as well as it leads teachers to develop their teaching in different areas. During my teaching practice, during the lessons I do assess students formatively. For instance, during the activity time I walked around and I observe the students as well as I take some notes about what they are doing. Moreover I ask them questions during the activity time to see how students think and how they improve. Another thing is asking them questions at the end of the lesson to see if they are meeting the learning objectives. Moving to summative assessment which can be done at the end of the unit or semester so teachers can figure out the students learning. As an example at the end of the unit, I used school assessing criteria in math. I asked every student about the shapes to see if they know the name of each shape.