Blog Post 2

Teaching, unlike many other professions, requires the teacher to reflect on what works and what doesn't in the classroom in order to improve and hone their skills. I feel like the craft of teaching can only be taught up to a certain point. After that it is left for new teachers to beg, borrow, and steal. For the material that is acquired through these methods is not guaranteed to work for your class. What works for a master veteran teacher may work in their classroom but not yours. Or it may work for them and not for you even if you say the same words. The problem is that ultimately teaching is a long game of trial and error. The final puzzle piece of this is reflection. It is necessary to get an idea, try it, and then reflect on how it works. If it works, then you must analyze why and see if maybe it can be used in a different application or improved. If it doesn't work, it must be analyzed as to why it didn't work and what can you can learn from the data acquired from the experience. Either way, it is important to be able to take a step back and look at what you did, what the outcome was, and how to improve it or whether to use it again or not. Teaching without reflection is not truly teaching because in teaching you also are supposed to be learning constantly. I believe that occasionally even veteran teachers have things they've tried in the past absolutely fail. They must still learn from this and adapt their teaching to show that they've acknowledge this. That doesn't make them a bad teacher, but means that they are simply still learning. I think the only true "bad teacher" is one that has evidence that what they are doing isn't working and isn't willing to reflect and adjust and keeps doing something ineffective because that's the way they've always done it.