These are all wonderful methods of reflection on your practice, and we strongly encourage you to engage in all of these kinds of activities to help you better understand yourself and your students and the learning which takes place within your classroom.  However, there is something missing from all of these methods of reflection.  When you reflect in these ways, you base your thoughts on what you perceived while you were teaching or what you remember seeing or doing.  Unfortunately, sometimes these perceptions don’t meet with the reality of the situation.  Our biases and our cognitive limitations frame what we see and what we think is happening within our classrooms.

In order to better understand our teaching and our students’ learning, sometimes we need to see our practice through eyes other than our own.  We need to actually observe ourselves as our students might observe us – to see and understand the ways we appear to them, and to see through the unclouded eyes of our memory, which has tendencies to paint our practice in rose-colored hues or bleak grays of self-loathing.  While we are unable to do this first-hand, we have the tools to allow us to reflect on our classrooms as our practice really unfolds.  And so, we ask you to use these tools to engage in your reflection.

We would like you to videotape at least three different teaching experiences at different times in your student teaching this year.  We hope these recordings will allow you to reflect on the day-to-day practices of your teaching, as well as the growth in your skills, abilities, and understanding of classroom habits as the year proceeds.  While we will not specifically note the times of these recordings as all of your schedules vary, we would encourage you to tape one of your early teaching sessions, another about mid-way through the teaching experience, and a final session near the end of the year.  You should review these tapes and write your thoughts and reflections not only immediately after the teaching sessions recorded, but also suggest that you review the older tapes later in the year, to understand the kinds of growth in your own practice as well as your students’ learning and behavior.  A compiled videotape, along with written reflections on each of these experiences as well as the whole recording, will be handed in on May 13.  This reflection should also assist you with your final reflections for the summary paper and presentations, as well as any professional portfolio needs.