Content area
Full Text
A reflective assessment will help you celebrate your accomplishments, evaluate your skills, use your strengths more efficiently and continue to set and attain goals.
Reflective practice - buzzwords that we hear a lot today. Becoming self-reflective infiltrates not only our professional lives, but our personal lives as well. We can buy self-help books that teach us to reflect on every aspect of our lives. Yet. what does it really mean to be a reflective educator? What difference will it make to be reflective about our practices, anyway?
As a classroom teacher pursuing National Board Certification through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I became very aware of the power of self-reflection. Every event in the portfolio work requires self-reflection. Through the process of reflection, teachers identify the strengths as well as the weaknesses in their instructional practices.
I often say that becoming a National Hoard Certified Teacher was the best professional development I ever engaged in because the self-reflective practice enabled me to identify the exemplars of my practice and plan the next steps in my professional development. I became a confident practitioner - able to ponder and adjust my practice to better meet the diverse learning needs of my students.
A few years have passed since that experience, and as I began my third year as an administrator I realized that 1 felt different from the previous two years. I noted that I now work with more confidence and I have a vision; a new direction tor the work I do. I have begun to ask myself reflective questions, such as, "What do I already know and do well? What additional skills do I need? How can I be more effective and make the work 1 do have more impact on student learning and teacher practice? Where am I headed in my career?"
In order to answer these questions, I devoted time to reflect and evaluate my skills and practice, celebrate my success and create a professional development plan. I knew I needed data from more sources than just my own reflections in order to make a valid professional assessment.
As a classroom teacher, I had completed what is known as a "360° Evaluation." It is...