What role does REFLECTION play in teaching? Think of a statistician. What does he do?

A statistician is someone who works on data that are outcome of past activities, experiments, or processes. After performing some statistical analyses the result is information that is very useful for similar future activities. Same is true with the reflective teacher. Reflecting on the success and failure of a particular lesson would give the teacher strong insight on the teaching learning process that has occurred in an educational environment. Reflection provides teacher information that will prevent him!her to commit the same mistake from occurring. Therefore, the role reflection does in teaching is to improve teacher"s performance and methodology. Teaching methods need to #e continuously assessed due to the fact that a good teacher is always aware of how he teaches. Reflecting is the #est way of reali$ing that awareness. %f we don"t reflect, we"re like #lind people or shall we say teachers teaching in the dark without knowing if we are effective and if there"s a need to modify our teaching. Reflecting re&uires us to answer a num#er of &uestions like, how do % interact with students?, how do % respond when they ask &uestions?, are my students involved?, why didn"t a lecture go over well?, etc. Reflective teachers not only ask &uestions, #ut they also use the answers to those &uestions to guide and change their instructional practices so they can #e more effective. Reflection allows teacher to analy$e further their classroom experiences. %t can provide them many ways of analy$ing real world scenarios and modern theories of learning. Reflective activities can help teacher sort through the masses of theories availa#le in the educational world. %n this way he can reason out why certain situations occurred or did not occur or why a particular lesson succeeded or failed. This kind of analysis provides the oftentimes very elusive relevance of theories in the actual practice. 'ut once the connection #ecame clear, dramatic improvement to the teacher"s effectiveness will eventually take place. %f teachers and in service educators sit down and analy$e a situation together and reflect on it, #etter decisions a#out curriculum and instruction can #e made. Reflection allows them to determine what educational principles must #e reached #y the school. They can also determine what kinds of learning experiences are apt to #e valua#le in reaching their o#(ectives. )oreover, it allows teachers to draw new ideas in developing the #est way of evaluating learning experiences. Reflection has #ecome an important part of improving teacher"s performance and methodology. As we have shown a#ove, it can make the teacher aware of how he teaches, it can provide the him ways to analy$e real world scenarios and modern learning theories, and allows him to make #etter decisions a#out curriculum and instruction. An old saying, *+ne step #ackward, two steps forward, is % think another illustration of what reflection does. Taking time out to take one step #ackward will give you the opportunity for self improvement, provide you #etter perspective, and allow you to have greater vision to push forward.