Professional Reflection

The step I believe will be the most difficult for me to carry out will be the reflection phase. After listening to the V.2.1 video, I agreed with his explanation of how most educators reflect. We tend to look at other people’s work, classrooms or research when we should reflect on our own. I think this is another one of those things where we are accustomed and conditioned to believe that we cannot reflect on our own work effectively. In Texas, we have T-TESS (Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System, where our appraiser comes into our classroom once during the school year during a 45-minute lesson and evaluates our teaching. On one side, I think, it is the law, it’s required, they do what they have to do. However, after looking at reflection in a different way, it made me realize that I should not take their “evaluation” of me in such a definite manner. Professionally, I will say thank you and take their “advice” with a smile, but I should have also already done my own reflection and see what worked and what did not and why and how I am going to make it better. For the past two years, I was taking their evaluation of my practices as gold. Now, I have a different way of looking at it.

https://edge.sagepub.com/mertler5e/student-resources/chapter-2/video-resources