Tools of Reflective Teaching: Introduction to Teaching Portfolio

October 28, 2014

The leader: Marzena Pepowska; the secretary: Solomia Hlibchuk.

Classroom Observation
This weeks class started with checking our home task, i.e. sharing the ideas
that each member of our group had written down in their journals. For the
greater part of the discussion we were talking about the entries in the
teachers journal that we had been presented with in the previous class. The
points that have arisen from our discussion are as follows:

The idea of keeping a teachers journal is good since a teacher can

put down his/her thoughts, feelings with the further opportunity of
rereading, and hence reconsidering them
A journal gives a teacher a possibility to see what strong and weak
parts of his/her lessons are, and consequently, it can serve as a push
towards improvement
Though the entries are mostly written in an informal style, they should
be structured and well-organized

We devoted some time to discussing the way we work in classes. Every

group member admitted that they liked the classroom organization (our
group work). But we also noticed that sometimes it was difficult for us to
come to a certain conclusion or an understanding at the end of a discussion.
The reason for this might have been time management as we felt to be
pressed with time.
Another task that we were to complete was to watch a school lesson, and
after to fill in the sheet of paper with some tasks. In our group we reached
the conclusion that no one quite liked the lesson for some obvious reasons.
We shared our opinion/fact statements about the video just to find out that
we had more opinions about the lesson than clear facts. Maybe, our group
was too judgmental.
To sum up, working in groups has lots of advantages. During the class in our
small group we shared our points of view on keeping a teachers journal
saying that it could be rather beneficent for teachers to have one. We

commented on the video presenting a school lesson and our discussion

ended in stating the facts as well as giving our opinions about the lesson.