After reflecting on these articles, I realize that I do not spend enough time using writing as a means to question, re-consider, imagine, and discover in order to gain more knowledge about a particular topic or concept. Rather, I usually spend more time reflecting through thinking and simply changing a technique or idea through action. For example, whenever I finish teaching I usually spend most of my time reflecting on the day when I drive home in my car. Then if I have an idea about how to improve my teaching or incorporate a different strategy into my lesson, I simply look online for new ideas and new sources of inspiration. It is rare that I take the time to sit down and write out my thoughts for how I could better support students because I usually don't have enough time, or I'm too anxious about coming up with new ideas that I skip this step.
However, when it comes to writing for school work such as my undergraduate work or my graduate work, I feel as though I do spend time on writing as a means to reflect, question, and re-consider because it is something that I was asked to do. Thinking about when I student taught and completed my field observations, I spent a lot of time reflecting through writing about these experiences. I believe that it was helpful to let my mind focus on whatever aspect of that day was either very beneficial or challenging and to consider how to move forward from there. I believe that writing was also helpful when I needed to go back to see how a particular day went or what I did for a specific activity. As I reflect now, I think that being asked to write down my ideas and thoughts during these important experiences were crucial for my learning.
One major reason that I choose not to engage in this kind of thinking is lack of motivation to do so. It's difficult for me to have the motivation to sit down and write after working all day and going to class. However, I feel that this is something that needs to change as I continue my career as a teacher because I believe that it's so important to document thoughts, ideas, and information in order to better support students. I also think it's important to for me to engage in this kind of writing, not only for work, but for my personal life as well.
In order to engage in writing that allows me to consider, clarify, refine, and synthesize, I believe that I must make it more motivating and engaging for myself. One thing that motivates me to complete any kind of assignment is when I'm allowed to be creative. Creativity is something that I admire, and I love having the opportunity to be creative. Creativity is one of the categories from "habits of mind", and this is an area I would like to focus on as I continue writing my blogs. Along with creativity, I would also like to spend time focusing on curiosity as well because I believe this will also help me to stay engaged with this writing process. There are so many ideas and strategies that I want to learn about as I continue this course, and I believe through creativity and curiosity I will make many new discoveries.
References
Council
of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English,
& National Writing Project. (2011). Framework for success in postsecondary writing. Retrieved from http://wpacouncil.org/framework/
Kucer,
S. B. & Rhodes, L. K. (1986).
Counterpart strategies: Fine
tuning language with language. The Reading
Teacher, 40(2), 186-193.
Tompkins,
G. E. (2019). Teaching
writing: Balancing process and product (7th
ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Merrill.
Catherine, I certainly understand the struggle with being tired after a long day. And while I don't want to be one to encourage distracted driving, I can say that when I was first teaching, I often had an old tape recorder in my car where I would just think aloud about the day as I drove home. Perhaps there might be a way to use the voice recorder on a phone to record your own think alouds as you drive home that could easily be translated later to a reflective professional journal? Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, I was thinking about how you could use these blog entries to be more "creative." One way may be to think more carefully about how you might use some of the instructional practices that you are reading about with either the students you are currently teaching or the students you really want to teach in the future. I believe you mentioned recently to me that you would love to teach kindergarten students. How might some of the activities we are reading about here work with this age group?