Lilly Cheek

Crawford 4th
Importance of Self-Reflection and Evaluation
Self-reflection is significant in the classroom. It affects the way that
teachers perceive themselves and it also allows the teacher to better their
teaching methods. In any instance, self-reflection has only proved to better
the person utilizing it and there are no negative consequences of using this
strategy. Self- reflection allows a teacher to analyze what they have done
and establish whether or not it was effective. Self-reflection is important
because its a process that makes you collect, record, and analyze
everything that happened in the lesson so you can make improvements in
your teaching strategies where necessary. (teachhub) The key to being a
successful and effective teacher is to take advantage of and utilize selfreflection.
The TeachHub articles reveals that there are four main ways to reflect
on your work in the classroom. Teachers can reflect by keeping a selfreflective journal, video recording their lesson, using student observation,
and using peer observations. Each of these ways has its own reason for use
and the easiest way to be completely effective is to try all of these reflective
strategies. Keeping a reflective journal will allow you to read over the way
you felt about your teaching that day, how the students reacted, and
whether you kept track of things such as time, effectiveness, and student

participation. Video recording provides an unaltered version of your lesson

that day. It is hard to make your classroom seem a certain way if there is a
recording showing the exact way everything went down that day. This
method also allows a teacher to notice anything extra such as ill behavior in
the classroom and prevent it from happening next time it occurs. Student
observation is a great way to self-reflect, a teacher can hand out a little
survey or ask the students to write down what they liked and disliked about
the lesson that day. This method allows the students have a little writing
exercise and it also allows the teacher to see how effective the lesson really
was directly from the students themselves. And, the last method is peer
evaluation, allowing a colleague to come into the classroom can actually
benefit both parties. The teachers can critique each other and learn from
each other at the same time. All of these methods can affect the academic
achievement of the students because when and if a teacher betters
themselves and makes a lesson more in depth and more effective and
establishes a way to really drill concepts into a students head, then the
student will actually be learning and not simply remembering facts which is
what a shallow lesson would provide.
Self-Reflection will help me so well in my future classrooms because it
will be a way for me to ensure that my lesson is more effective. There are no
cons of using self-reflection, therefore there is no reason why I should not use
it. I believe that it will benefit me in a classroom setting and allow me to
make changes where need be.

http://www.teachhub.com/teaching-strategies-value-self-reflection
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108008/chapters/Learning-ThroughReflection.aspx
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3167369/