4. Creating a reflection document

While writing this reflection document, I really realized the flaw in my distal and proximal goals. They aren’t specific enough. I’m doing the same thing that I always do, which is trusting that I can do a good job without organization, curriculum or detailed plans. That can be a benefit when teaching critical thinking. It’s important that I’m able to go off the map and have strange, unplanned discussions with my students. But “plan for the worst” means having each lesson, each reflection, and each interaction planned out as much as possible. That’s the best way to ensure that – at the very least – my students are able to demonstrate the knowledge and skills I was intending to cover in the unit. And it also means that any new teacher can take my curriculum, understand it, and either reproduce it or adjust it based on their own teaching style. However, these reflections might be better saved for my final submission. For now, I found the reflection document quite straightforward. It’s very similar to some critical thinking exercises I’ve done with my students before. The worry is – as always – that I won’t continue to use it for each week’s lessons. I hope if I can continue doing this for each unit, I can develop my SRL skills to the point where I know how to motivate myself to complete the reflections every week instead of “Work’s done, time to sleep!” every Friday.