Ask Dr. BKW - What should be in my teacher reflective journal entries?

Teachers has been asked to maintain reflective journals throughout the school that will assist assigned evaluator and mentor ensuring teachers are working toward highly-qualified education for children and their families. The question was posed “What should be in my teacher reflective journal”?

The teacher journal is used to aid teachers to reflect on practices in the classroom, relationships between teacher-child, teacher-parent, teacher-colleague, and teacher-stakeholders at large for the betterment of preparing children for school success in the 21^st century.  Journal entries provide a way to record teacher activities/strategies, thoughts and ideas about events, it is more thought provocative to better your skills as a teacher.  Remember teacher reflective journal entries should be used as ‘learning’ journals.

Scanlon and Chemomas (1997) have three-stages that can be used as you write entries in your teacher journal:

1.      Stage 1:  Awareness.  These are your thoughts about an event in teaching that went well or strategies for implementing different.

2.      Stage 2:  Critical Analysis.  You are exploring what happened and why.  Also, you will relate previous experiences with the ideas and practices used.

3.      Stage 3:  New Perspective.  This is confirmed or reinforced based upon your reflections.  This stage supports your understanding of when development occurs, in thinking and/or feelings, and sometimes change may occur in your practices.

Here are some helpful tips for writing reflective journal entries as you progress forward this school year.

1.      How are thing going overall?  What seems to be going well and/or not well?

2.      Select a specific situation you were directly involved in (with children, colleagues, parents, etc.) which you want to think more about.  Your journal entries will focus on your interaction as a teacher (i.e., what you said and did).  Here are some prompts that can assist in your reflective writings.

a.       Describe the meaningful experience in detail so your reader will gain a clearer understanding of the situation (what happened?, what did you do/say?, what did the children/adults involved in the situation do/say? , and so forth).

b.      Elaborate on what you hope the outcomes would be in this interaction.

c.       Elaborate on how you used questions, comments, materials and/or other means to facilitate or participate in interactions.

d.      Envision how you would re-do the situation with same children/adults, what are two or three things you would do differently to improve outcome?

e.       What did you learn about yourself as a teacher though this interaction?

Remember there are different resources you can Google on reflective journal writing entries that best works for you to show your growth through this process as a teacher.   As you continue to reflect hopefully it will enhance the conversation among your assigned evaluator and mentor as they work with you the be the best educator for children.