Sunday, March 16, 2008

for me,

Reflection often has two components. . . me thinking about what I am doing and a conversation with another who may ask questions, seek clarification or express their own opinion. Reflection involves growth or change for me--even if that is simply an affirmation as I think over what happened.

For example,  I often happen upon a workable strategy  "in the moment"  and I have found others do too. . . 

Recently I read on the British Columbia Math teachers forum a link to a site that explained another way of doing long division, using only the multiples of 100, 10, 5, 2 and 1.  When I showed it to my teammates (5th grade teachers) one of them said, "Oh, I created that in my differentiation class" and then proceeded to pull up an explanation that was very similar. So, for her, as we talked about how this would work in a classroom it was an affirmation of her earlier work, while for me, the conversation afforded an opportunity to think through with a trusted colleague, the steps and procedures we would use as we team taught.  (She, by the way, is the Special Ed resource teacher and I am the Gifted Resource Teacher--and we combine our math classes three times weekly to differentiate and share strategies. . .  talk about action research!)

Check out this link and share your opinion:  http://mindfull:wordpress.com  (about halfway down where it begins "Division is about sharing.")

Enjoy!
Paula
  

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Paula,

You said that reflection involves "growth and change" for you. That makes reflecting a powerful tool for you. I feel that too often, some teachers (often the veterans) don't allow themselves to truly reflect, simply because they resist change--their reflections consist only of affirmations.