Goal

8 Reflective Analysis

1. Describe how this artifact relates to the knowledge you acquired in EDUC 560 – Student
Engagement and Standards Based Learning. What did you learn from this class that you
applied in your classroom?

While these reflection artifacts come specifically from EDUC 560 – Student Engagement and
Standards Based Learning, every PLS class, foundation course, or elective course through
Rockford have gotten me to do a lot of continuous reflecting on my teaching. These courses
have helped me get into a habit of doing reflection regularly—I make sure to reflect at the end
of a lesson, end of a school day, end of a unit, and with my coworkers.

EDUC 560 – Student Engagement and Standards Based Learning taught me many strategies to
teach life skills to my students. One key takeaway was when my instructor discussed how the
secondary thing we are teaching our students in the most important thing that they will take
away with them for their futures. Using a variety of engagement strategies and QFL Process
skills are key for this secondary learning to occur. This class emphasized the importance of
including engaging strategies, QFL Process Skills, and 21st century skills in each lesson that we
teach. I learned about many creative activities and interactive lesson ideas that can better meet
the learning standard along with higher student engagement. In this course, we did a lot of
reflecting through discussions and writing about things that I already do well and things that I
can improve on. Reflection is an extremely important part of being a great teacher – I learned
that through reflection, I can make changes or adjustments in my methods to better meet the
needs of my students and to better teach the content objectives.

2. Brief description of artifact.

My artifact for Goal 8 is a personal reflection journal that I wrote in each day throughout the
course EDUC 560 – Student Engagement and Standards Based Learning. This journal required
me to reflect on my own teaching and relate it to topics that we were learning in the class. Each
journal entry had a specific prompt for me to reflect on. Writing a personal reflection journal
allows me to gain new insights to different activities, teaching methods, things that I’m doing
well with in the classroom, and recognizing aspects of my teaching that I can improve on.

3. Analysis of what you learned from this artifact. What did you change in your classroom as a
result of the artifact?

Reflection is crucial in order for me to be the best teacher I can be. In my classroom, I not only
do personal reflection of my teaching, but I also like to reflect on how my students reacted to
the lessons, how they did on assessments, and their engagement. I include a lot of student
surveys in my classroom to have students answer questions about specific lessons, my teaching,
and to reflect on their own learning and understanding.

I do a lot of my own reflecting in my teaching plan book where I write specific notes about each
lesson – identifying things that went well, things I should modify, and things that completely
need to change or be taken out of the lesson. After EDUC 560 and the journaling that I did, I
was able to incorporate a lot of the new strategies that I learned about into my teaching. A lot
of these new strategies have made my lessons more engaging for students.

One example that I use in my lessons that is also part of the artifact for Goal 8 is the “Same and
Different” activity. With some of the concepts that I teach in math, there are a variety of ways
to reach the final answer. Often times when students are doing practice, I’ll have them “think,
pair, share” with their partner to identify similarities and differences in their processes. In a
lesson that I taught recently, my students were calculating percentages of a quantity. After
students paired up to discuss similarities and differences in their working, we then came
together as a class and identified four different ways to reach the solution.

4. How does this artifact relate to the goal? Refer to dispositions under each goal.

This artifact relates to Goal 8 because it shows through my reflection that I am trying to
improve my teaching methods and then based on my reflection I was able to try new strategies
in my classroom. I am always willing to try new techniques, methods, and activities in order to
best meet the needs of my students and in order to best teach my content objectives. I believe
that teaching methods and strategies are always evolving, and reflection can help teachers
continuously evolve and better themselves as well.