Entrance Slip #1: Grant & Zeichner on Becoming a Reflective Teacher

Despite being written in a different time and place, the article, “On Becoming a Reflective Teacher”, still has pertinent, thoughtful, and helpful information and more notably, mentioned ideas that I have personally thought about as a prospective teacher.  I have the privilege of being amazing friends with my older sister who also happens to be an outdoor, elementary school teacher.  She is my go-to source of information about teaching and teaching experiences.  And thinking back to the moments I’ve bombarded her with questions about how to approach a specific, hypothetical problem in the classroom, she always gave me a somewhat open-ended yet reassuring answer.  I asked my sister, “How is it physically and emotionally possible to teach twenty-five students of varying skill levels?  What do you do when a student finishes early, or if a student is working at a much slower pace than everyone else?”, and I thought that the intent of efficiently and effectively solving any problem was the incontestable goal.  I thought that finding a concrete solution was ideal and fathomable, but this attitude towards teaching might possibly lead me to burnout early and easily; I might unknowingly gravitate towards the approaches and methods of unreflective teaching, in the sense that I might be practicing this unideal approach, so much so, that I subconsciously concentrate my efforts on determining the most effective means to just achieve ends.  From the article and from my sister, I learned that I might have to face a multitude of teaching scenarios in which I feel so overwhelmed by and believe I have gone through all the solutions for, but this is normal.  And reflecting and discussing the realities of teaching, no matter the situation, is preparation—is a solution—in and of itself.