Actively Engaging in Reflective Practice as an Educator

 Hello everyone and welcome to my final blog!

Although I have thoroughly enjoyed creating this blog for all of you, it had to come to an end eventually. This may be the end of the blog, but it will not be the end of reflective practice for me! As an aspiring teacher, we have been advised of the benefits of reflective practice and how it will make you a better educator. These blogs were one form of reflective practice for me and I will ensure I keep practicing reflection in a variety of different methods. Ensure you continue to do the same and track how it has improved your practice!

As educators our pedagogy will continually develop as we go through our career. Since I am the student who is actively engaged with school and ensures I do all of my homework, I used to assume everyone was the same. After going into my placement and observing students, it began apparent to me that I was wrong. I pondered this idea and reflected on how this may shift the way I structure my classroom. I will need to ensure that my material and activities are engaging enough to keep students interested and focused. I will look to achieve this by ensuring I engage with mathematics, and with my students! This is an idea that me and colleagues discussed today and we felt it’s a good way to centralize your lessons. If you can’t be engaged with the material, how do you expect your students to be? Indulging ourselves into the material will help us understand how our students feel about the activity and identify potential hiccups in the task. 

One of the other components of mathematics education my colleagues and myself reflect on, is when/how we choose to include real world applications. Oftentimes you will hear “Why are we learning this” or  “When am I ever going to use the Pythagorean Theorem in my life”. This can be really frustrating to hear as a teacher knowing your students don’t think this is useful. What is worse is if you don’t have an answer for these students. Imagine your one of those students and your educator has no reasonable response as to why it’s important we learn mathematics. This can be demoralizing and create a bad misconception of mathematics. I believe that it’s important to include multiple real world applications in each unit. I would also recommend having a brief discussion with your students throughout the unit to discuss how this mathematics can be used in the real world. This will help create engagement and give students a clear understanding of why we learn math.

For my last segment, I will share with you all my last joke of the week!

This has been a very engaging and meaningful experience that has helped me improve as an educator. Thank you all for reading!!!!

Madison Salmond