"Hi All,
Attached is the End of the Year Reflection sheet that was discussed in the Department meetings on Monday June 14, 2010. The document is self explanatory but if you have any questions please do not hesitate to see your administrator. Please complete this document and turn it in to your administrator by the close of school on Thursday June 17, 2010. This reflection will be stapled to the summative evaluation at the end of the year.
Administration"
Here is my response...
2009-2010 End of the Year Reflection
To the fullest extent possible, answer the following questions:
1. The most positive aspect of my experience (or an area I showed strength) since my last evaluation (Summative, Formal, Informal, AND/OR Walk Through) has been:
a. I believe that my biggest strength in the classroom is my focus on student self-assessment especially in my AP courses. I have had some success in pushing most of my students to assess their own understanding of the material, craft questions designed to fill in the gaps, and ask those questions. In my AP courses this Socratic Method has largely replaced my lectures, and it has resulted in students who take greater responsibility for their own understanding of the material. Paradoxically, these methods have proven unsuccessful with my lower level students.
2. What changes in my teaching styles are needed to make my students succeed as well as support equity, justice, and respect to all learners in my class?
a. From my perspective, the only way to support equity, justice, and respect for all learners is to maintain high standards in the face of numerous and daily requests to lower them. While occasionally, exceptions may be necessary to ensure student success, for the most part fairness is not achieved through selectively lowering standards as a habit of practice. I need to work harder at maintaining high expectations to ensure that the path of least resistance for the students is success. I think the answer to this is three-fold. 1. I need to decrease my willingness to accept student claims that they don’t know how to do something. 2. I need to increase student accountability for their own success. 3. I need to ensure that each lesson contains information, tasks, and understandings for which the student will be held accountable in order to ensure that students understand that each day is important to their success. These efforts would have a much higher potential for success however if the culture of the building better fit the broad application of high standards.
3. How can I more effectively facilitate less teacher dependency/increase cooperative learning/utilize greater problem solving to promote higher order thinking in my class?
a. In my years of teaching so far the only habits of practice that have achieved lowering teacher dependence have been efforts to raise my standards for student accountability and engagement. In order to achieve this next year I will seek to hold students accountable for what they learned in other classes prior to my own. I will be less willing to answer the statement “I don’t know” with an immediate answer or suggestion of how to do something. Finally I will increase my expectations that students find answers to historical questions through their own research. This will require more scrutiny in grading to ensure that answers are in their own words rather than copied directly from a source.
b. I am not sure how I can increase cooperative learning in my classroom as it is a part of almost every lesson.
c. As with lessening independence, I will utilize greater problem solving skills by increasing my expectation that students will seek to find their own answers before I help them do so.
4. How may I better motivate my students to engage in meaningful and authentic learning both in my class and extended to out-of-school contexts?
a. Given the factual nature of my courses, authentic learning opportunities do not abound, and what opportunities exist I already take advantage of.
b. As for learning out of school, I admit this to be a weakness especially in my college-prep courses and short of increased failures I am unsure of how to remedy it.
5. How do I successfully communicate frequently and sensitively with parents in order to engage them in the instructional program?
a. I call home when there are disciplinary or academic issues. Other than that I find reliance of parents to motivate students is contrary to my goal of student independence.
6. How do I measure success and report it?
a. Through my grades.
7. Two important things I have learned since my last evaluation (Summative, Formal, Informal, AND/OR Walk Through) report include:
a. That expectations for student performance are generally lower than they should be at our school, and it is extremely difficult to maintain my own high expectations without a culture of high expectations throughout the school.
b. My sophomores have extreme difficulty retaining facts, and I am unsure how to surmount this motivation question.
8. In planning for the future, one of the things I especially want to keep in mind for an individual student or group of students is:
a. Altering standards on an individual basis can be productive for an individual or two in terms of management and ensuring success for those specific individuals. This is however a dangerous game that leads to dropping standards for everyone if it is not strictly regulated.
9. One goal that I have for myself is:
a. Building factual retention and student investment through increased efficiency in terms of creating an atmosphere in which every student respects every moment of my class, recognizing it to be valuable.
10. An area I would like to discuss with my supervisor is:
a. How to increase feedback on my lesson plans.
b. How to increase feedback on evaluations.
c. Suggestions to increase factual retention/investment/motivation.
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