Mid-Year Reflections

Last week I was scrolling through Twitter and I came across a link to George Couros' blog post, 4 Reflective Questions for the End of the School Year.  While it may be drawing near to the end of the school year and summer breaks in the northern hemisphere, schools in the southern hemisphere are approaching the mid-year of our school year and trying to stay warm and dry as our winter truly begins to kick in.

However, reading through George's blog post, I thought these four questions would be valuable to use to take stock as I approach the middle of the year as line in the post, "we move forward not only be looking to the future, but learning from the past", is something that I've held to through my teaching career.

The four questions are:

1. What did I do well this year?
2. Where do I need to grow?
3. What things will I challenge myself with next year?
4. How will all of these answers impact the learners I serve?

So now, as we begin Week 6 of Term 2, I shall reflect on these four questions.

What did I do well this year?

• I have established relationships with each individual students.
• I have established relationships with their parents.
• I have grown my relationships with my colleagues.
• I have turned a really ugly classroom space into a bright, welcoming room which reflects and celebrates the learning we are doing.
• I have set a high standard for the learning in our class.
• I have, with the students, set an expectation for how we will behave and the promotion of the virtue of kindness, the attitude of it isn't a problem if we can fix it and the go-forward belief of we can do better.
• The reading programme, Reading Tumble, poem of the week, Newsbook, fitness, writing, art, buddy reading and read to aspects of our programme are going great and we are building up our mathematics programme and topic learning.
• I make sure my students leave every day with a positive word from me.

Where do I need to grow?

My time management is always going to be my life-long challenge.  Some days I nail it... others I don't.

What things will I challenge myself with for the second half of this year?

Note that I have modified this question from the one George asked.  And I've narrowed it down to these:

• Embed the maths programme better - routines, groups, activities, expectations.
• Do better at giving out the kindness hearts to reinforce kindness in our class.
• Keep the learning fun and engaging but meaningful.

How will these answers impact on the learners I serve?

I would hope that the following would happen:

• An organised teacher.
• A happy teacher.
• An ability to be responsible for increased aspects of their own learning.
• Being engaged in the learning and making contributions to how the learning happens.
• Being happy with school and being in my class.
• Succeeding in learning.

Maybe you too can use these questions to refocus you on the second half of this school year.