Reflective Journal #1

As part of the course, we have to keep a Reflective Journal including our thoughts, questions and any implementation activities we have already tried or we may want to try.

I totally agree with all that has been said and all that I have read during this first unit of the course. I have started to consider assessment as a key piece of both instruction and the learning process in order to help both students and teacher to know how to improve their learning/teaching to be more meaningful for the students. Now I consider assessment an essential element and not just a small part of our curriculum saying which the final goals our students need to achieve during the learning process are. Thus, I think backward planning is the key so as to change our mind.

However, I wonder why don’t we get more time to be able to analyze with detail our students work so that we can provide them with effective and meaningful feedback? Shouldn’t schools take this into account when planning teachers’ timetable?

To be honest I don’t know yet how we can fit all this outstanding ideas into our busy week, where we just have around 3 to 4 hours to plan the lessons, correct our students work –which when being formative is by far more work for the teacher-, etc. and meet with our students to give them feedback. Obviously I know that I have recently started teaching so I hope that when I will gain experience I will need to spend less time for doing some of these activities.