Main Body
Reflection
“Reflection is deliberate and structured thinking about choices. It is an integral step to improving our practice. Through reflection, we as educators, can look clearly at our struggles and consider options for change.” (Taryn Sanders) Reflection involves looking at student work to determine the efficacy of your instruction. It’s a process of self-observation and self-evaluation. Reflection comes in many forms including:
- written accounts of experiences (journal writing, blogging, self-reporting)
- audio/video recording of teaching to capture the moment-to-moment process of teaching
- collaborating with colleagues
- analyzing student work
- peer observation can provide opportunities for you to view other colleagues in order to expose yourself to different teaching styles and to provide opportunities for critical reflection on your own teaching
Reflecting and Growing in the CPS Lesson Plan
The most successful, highly effective teachers are reflective practitioners. Following the teaching of your planned lesson, you will reflect upon your instruction and experience. You will do so with the educator who observed your lesson (Clinical Experience Educator; Clinical Placement Faculty, or a member of the CPS Faculty). This is an extremely valuable opportunity in which to receive constructive feedback that, if acted upon, will positively impact the planning and execution of your future instruction. Doing so is logged in your Clinical Log and aligned with the ‘Professional Responsibility’ Standard.
At CPS’s Center for Educator Preparation we strongly recommend that you to video tape yourself as you instruct students, if permitted in your school district. This provides powerful insight into your teaching practices and habits. It allows you to observe everything from your body language to your verbal language as well as interactions with students. It enables you to monitor your effective implementation of professional instructional practice. As a result of reflection you are able to identify an area for growth in future lessons.
You are additionally expected to reflect in writing following your observed teaching, referring to effective documented evidence of your students’ progress in planning the next steps in your students’ learning. You’ll reflect upon the processes used in your instruction and the classroom environment. You’ll note what went well and determine an area of your teaching to focus upon in the future (Professional Responsibility).
CEP: Student Examples :
| Overall, I was happy with the lesson even after the rocky start. Pauses in the lesson and interruptions due to behaviors interfered with the pacing but improved the classroom climate to allow for learning to happen.
The transition between the cut and paste activity and the peer poster activity was slow. For the next lesson, I will ensure that materials for all activities are in place prior to the start of the lesson to keep the flow going. Dealing with behaviors reduced the time that students had to complete the activities and time wasted to get the posters taped down further interfered with time for the activity. This made it impossible to lead a whole group discussion and allow students to review the work of the other group, self-reflection on learning, or circle back to the learning goal to congratulate students on their successes. In the next lesson, I will direct the available paraprofessional, assigned to a student demonstrating resistance, to offer choice of process as well as a break outside of the environment.
The students were engaged in the lesson and I felt the pacing was good despite the fact we were not able to complete the entire lesson as planned. Valuable information was gathered about the present levels of student understanding. The classroom climate was animated but the students did a great job despite the fact that this was the first lesson after a 4 day weekend due to the snow storm and the fact that they were very excited about the solar eclipse that day. This is a lot of energy and excitement for a group of ADHD students to contain. Students did a good job even though there wasn’t much movement in the lesson as planned. The next lesson will be adjusted to incorporate more movement opportunities. |
Data Analysis
Data related to your students’ lesson objective mastery must be presented. This data should show the degree to which individual students met the lesson objective(s). A table, tally sheet, or checklist is often the clearest way to display this data. Data might be organized and presented as:
| Students | S/D #1 | S/D #2 | S/D #3 | S/D #4 | S/D #5 | S/D #6 | Notes |
| D.K. | + | + | + | + | + | + | added more; enrichment |
| K.S. | + | + | + | + | + | + | mastered |
| C.C. | + | + | + | – | – | – | confused similarity & difference |
| H.B. | absent; needs to make up | ||||||
| N.M. | + | + | + | + | review book | ||
| E.G. | + | + | + | + | + | + | mastered verbally (adapted assessment) |
| T.C. | + | + | + | + | + | + | added more; enrichment |
| C.W. | + | + | + | + | – | – | confused similarity & difference |
| M.N. | + | + | + | + | – | – | review book |
Analysis: It is evident that subgroups could be created to address current levels of student understanding. These could consist of two different mini-lessons; one for distinguishing similarity/difference and one for reviewing the text in identifying additional similarities/differences. A third subgroup needs a higher level of challenge.
Example of analysis:
Referring to the data collection above, this may look like:
The next lesson will include several different groupings:
- T.C. and D.K. will pursue further research in an ‘expert group’ in which they’ll create a project of choice related to the class topic.
- C.C. and C.W. will participate in a mini-lesson distinguishing the meanings of similar and different.
- N.M. and M.N. will join a mini-lesson in which a new text about the rainforest will be shared. Strategies for extracting facts will be modeled as the students compare the plants and animals.
CEP Student’s Example:
Notes from paras and my observations show that two students were able to quickly identify the subject in each sentence for 100% accuracy and two students did not meet the goal. One student (MW) stopped engaging in discussion with his peer so it is difficult to tell if his correct responses were due to an understanding or just crossing out whatever was left in the sentence. Another student (CF) demonstrated confusion on two sentences by including part of the predicate in his answers putting him at 80% accuracy.
More practice and information is needed to determine level of mastery. Two students (NS & AJ) should participate in challenge activities.
CEP Student Example:
Show the data you have that demonstrates student learning (individual or groups).
| Capital | Subject | Verb | Stop Sign | |
| A.B. | Absent | Absent | Absent | Absent |
| T.B. | 4/4 | 1/4 | 2/4 | 4/4 |
| C.F. | 4/4 | 2/4 | 3/4 | 4/4 |
| N.S. | 4/4 | 3/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 |
| M.W. | 4/4 | 1/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 |
A pattern that emerged in the group is the struggle to identify the subject and verb in most sentences. This shows that gaps in learning exist that should be addressed before students move on. This sheds light onto confusion and negative behaviors that have been documented when students meet with teachers during writer’s conferences to review work and discuss necessary edits.
Two students have writing goals in their IEPs (fluency and structure) that would be impacted by these gaps in learning as well as the inconsistent use of capitalization and punctuation. Functionally, addressing these gaps and improving the consistency in their use of capitalization and punctuation will improve the readability of their writing. The students were able to identify the need for capitalization and ending punctuation in their sentence writing and the data shows that they were able to identify the use in their writing.
CPS’s Aligned LOFT Evaluation Criteria:
|
Lesson Adjustments
Show your plan for improving student understanding of the objective in your next lesson based on the student work generated during this lesson. Look carefully at the student work produced in this lesson and determine how you might best address any misunderstandings students are demonstrating or how you might take students to the next level of learning relevant to your objective in the subsequent lesson.
CPS’s Aligned LOFT Evaluation Criteria:
|
CEP Student Example:
Based on the information that was gathered during this lesson, my plan is to build the group’s understanding of the subject of a sentence. My plan is to help students see that sentences are made up of parts that can be broken up. Recognizing that the subject and predicate are parts of the whole sentence will help them meet the lesson objective when we return to the activity.
Intentional Supports (Special Education Teacher Candidates)
Reflect on the supports you included for your special education students. How did your supports for students influence their learning outcomes? Note the adjustments you made to respond to your special education students’ needs, as well as future adjustments that will be increasingly beneficial. What is your plan for decreasing students’ reliance on these supports, eventually removing them?
Example:
CPS’s Aligned LOFT Evaluation Criteria:
|
CEP Student Example:
Using the think aloud strategy and completing the work together, through class discussions, helped students stay engaged throughout the lesson helped me adjust my questioning to gather information about student understandings. Combining the auditory learning with the visual display allowed me to access two preferred learning styles at the same time during instruction, questioning, and prompting. The picture icons (the labels) used to create the visual reference poster along with the information helped students during the lesson with recall allowing them to be more successful.
Moving from simple to complex helped students build their confidence and be more open to taking academic risk with the more complex tasks of identifying the subject and verb in each sentence. This also coincided with moving from the outside to the inside, which helped students see that sentences should have a distinct beginning and end with important information in the middle. This helped students look at the whole sentence and see that all parts of the sentence were equally important.
Integrating Theory and Practice in the CPS Lesson Plan
Example:
During my EDC coursework and planning lessons for observations, I put more emphasis on using a combination of preferred learning styles in order to reach more students and provide opportunities for success. Many mentor teachers that I collaborated with during my early years of teaching used the traditional lecture-discussion and then answer questions on a worksheet approach to teaching. I was encouraged to follow in this manner and discouraged from planning lessons that were “too complicated” or needed “too many materials”. As I continued my reading and research during my EDC coursework, I took the opportunity to plan activities that reach students who are kinesthetic learners. I also began to see that, not only were students more engaged and retaining more information, these lessons were not scary or complicated. However, they did require students to have a different set of social skills and level of social/emotional awareness that makes lessons with kinesthetic activities successful. As a result, I had to consider the level of details provided in the directions that I give (Sinha, 2014). It also paved the way for more authentic assessments of skills that provide more information about student competency than a fill-in-the-blank worksheet (What is Kinesthetic Learning: And Why It Matters, n.d.).
Sinha, K. (2024, July 24). Kinesthetic Learning: Moving Toward a New Model for Education. Edutopia; George
Lucas Educational Foundation.
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/kinesthetic-learning-new-model-education-kirin-sinha
What is Kinesthetic Learning: And Why It Matters. (n.d.). Multisori.com.
https://multisori.com/blogs/getting-started-with-montessori/kinesthetic-learnin
CPS’s Aligned LOFT Evaluation Criteria:
|
