Last summer I remember that one of my goals for student teaching was to make a constant effort to reflect on my teaching after every class I taught.  As I started student teaching I quickly realized what a challenge it was to find time to sit down and write out comments on how the class went.  This summer we were forced to reflect for nearly an hour on our teaching each day, immediately after we taught.  And that was just one class!  My cooperating teacher and I talked a lot about how what I did in my classes could be improved, what was going well, etc, and many good points came up in these conversations. As I became more adjusted to the pace of teaching and settled into a sort of routine, I began to find more time to write down my reflections of my teaching. Writing down reflections helps chart my improvement and better document the part of the standard that asks, "How effectively is the reflection and/or criticism used in improving performance?"

            One area in which I improved in my teaching was in the use of exit tickets (I could have incorporated more entrance tickets).  The use of exit tickets and entrance tickets is not exactly a "natural" action for a teacher to take because it forces one to make an active effort to stop class with a few minutes remaining and have the students reflect on what they have learned or issues they need to address.  While my instinct is to push through the entire 45 minutes until the bell rings, I learned that taking a few minutes at the end to use an exit ticket is a valuable tool both to inform my practice and to help the students reflect on their own learning and add structure to the end of my class. In the future I think I will have my students keep journals in the classroom that serve the purpose of organizing these mini-assessment types.

            As I progressed through my student teaching I began to incorporate more "risks," as the standard mentions, and use new instructional strategies.  Because I chose my Personal Inquiry Presenation (PIP) to incorporate more reading and literacy activities in class, I experimented with literacy templates, a Socratic seminar, and new forms of literacy (new for the students) that tested my ability to make such tools understandable for the students.  In my unit plan on the nervous system for my human physiology class, I took the class to the computer lab, which was a sort of "risk" in itself for me to see how much could be accomplished in such an environment and with the activity I planned.  I also found the use of concept maps (a tool I was initially hesitant about using) exceptionally useful in both of my classes as a means of allowing my students to create their own connections between the material learned.

            Continuuing education is an area that innately interests me. I found myself, just the other day, emailing an education professor at the University of Kentucky to attempt to make some early connection with the academic world of education in the city which I will soon be living. The urge to continue my learning, in biology and in education, is something that is always within me. As teachers we must always remain active learners ourselves.