My Reflection

In my classroom, I’m always striving to be the best teacher I can be. This often means making mistakes, reflecting on them, and then finding ways to improve. I’m always looking for beneficial changes I can make and new resources that I can use in my classroom to elevate my lessons. Throughout this course, and really throughout my entire master’s program, I have focused on reflection. Part of learning as an educator is accepting feedback and making adjustments that will benefit you and your students. As this class comes to a close, I took some time to revisit a past assignment and reflect on it.

For this assignment, I wrote an essay about how I had become an expert at marching while I was a member of Michigan State’s Spartan Marching Band. My first essay was solid, however, there’s always room for growth. I looked at it critically and considered the feedback I had received and made some changes. Here is my new essay based on the reflection that I have done. Through this class, I have realized how crucial reflection and feedback is to the learning process. Having others review my work allows me to view my work from a different perspective and help make it better. Moving forward, I will continue to be reflective and use feedback to improve my teaching, as well as encourage my own students to develop these same skills.

Rethinking Lessons Through Research

Whenever I’m planning a lesson, I go back and reread my plans, continue to talk though my ideas even after I originally brainstormed them, and often make many changes. It’s part of designing lessons as best as one can. Knowing what changes to make can be difficult. One way teachers can be more confident in their adjustments is to conduct research. This is what I have done recently for a lesson I am currently designing on the Five Themes of Geography for my 6th graders. As I was going through my feedback, I started to wonder what else I should be doing to help make my lesson more accessible to my students, so that is what I focused on first. In one journal, it focused on assistive technology and the design of the lesson. It was found that students benefit the most from having assistive technology be installed on their own devices and that designs such as transcripts, screen readers/auditory options, and easy to see color schemes are also helpful (She & Martin, 2022). With this, I made sure that my font and assignment designs are easy to read and reassured myself that I will have assistive technology on all of my students’ Chromebooks.

Photo of Student by Compare Fibre on Unsplash

Another part of my lesson I was questioning was the group work aspect. Sometimes students dislike working in groups because they are afraid of other students bringing down their grade. However, after researching and finding that “all students, regardless of disability status, benefited from [cooperative learning] experiences,” I am confident in including group work in the lesson I’m planning (Van Ryzin et al., 2024). By using research to guide my lesson planning decisions, I am more likely to create strong and beneficial lessons for all of my students.

Compare Fibre. (2021). Photo of Student. [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-in-red-and-white-hoodie-wearing-black-headphones-e5sTz361Jzg?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

She, L., & Martin, F. (2022). Systematic Review (2000 to 2021) of Online Accessibility Research in Higher Education. American Journal of Distance Education, 36(4), 327–346. https://doi-org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/10.1080/08923647.2022.2081438

Van Ryzin, M. J., Murray, C., & Roseth, C. J. (2024). The effects of cooperative learning on self-reported peer relations, peer support, and classroom engagement among students with disabilities. Journal of Educational Research, 117(6), 355–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2024.2410494

Staying Critical

As a teacher, I am constantly trying to find ways to become better for my students. I look at my style of teaching, the different assignments I create, the different technology I bring into the classroom, and more because being critical of what I use and how I use it helps me become a better teacher. It helps me explore new skills and ideas that benefit my students.

Today, there is a large push to incorporate technology into the classroom. While I find technology incredibly useful, as many people do, there are many other aspects of it to keep in mind. Unfortunately, some technology is inaccessible to some people. The district that I teach in is more affluent than many other areas, however there are still issues of accessibility. I teach many students with disabilities, and these disabilities can create barriers for them in using technology. While websites have increasingly gotten better at accessibility for those with disabilities, “a number of research studies indicate that many existing websites remain inaccessible” (Kurt, 2018). When a website is being designed or updated, it should be kept in mind that there will be users that will need to use some sort of non-standard technology to help them, so it is the website’s responsibility to ensure compatibility between its content and assistive devices/tools (Kurt, 2018). As a teacher, it is my job to remain critical of websites and explore how accessible they are for my students, and if they are not, I can evaluate how I can adjust them to become more accessible.

I use many different online resources in my classroom. This brings in unique tools for my students and interesting content. With this, another topic that I must remain critical of is my students’ privacy. Now, I am not new to the idea of privacy. Early on as a student of education I had learned about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA is designed to protect students’ identifying information and restricts schools from sharing this information without a parent’s consent (Office of Educational Technology). The discussion of privacy goes beyond what the school can release. With the usage of technology, many websites are recording data and information about its users. As a teacher that often uses various websites, it is important for me to be critical of which websites I use and what the privacy policies are for these resources. It is important to protect my students’ privacy as best as I can.

Another resource that is becoming more prominent is Artificial Intelligence (AI). My students are very curious about AI and are typically very interested in what it can do. I understand the curiosity, however, I am also aware of downsides that come with technology. One large downside relates to the issue of privacy. Many AI models are currently being trained using real people’s own creations (Leffer, 2023). Developers are using this work, which does include many copyrighted materials, to feed their AI models. This is a huge ethical issue, and as a teacher, it worries me about my students’ privacy. If I have my students use AI in the classroom, who knows what sort of information they are giving to these websites. As useful as these tools are, we have to be critical of how ethical it may be.

I really enjoy trying new resources for my classroom and bringing in new technology. After all, this technology is not going to go away, so it is important to understand it and know how to use it safely. I find it crucial, though, to be critical of these new creations and analyze how students are able to use them and how they affect my students. There are many issues surrounding new technology, and we should be aware of the constraints, downsides, and negative impacts it can have.

Resources:

Kurt, S. (2018). Moving toward a universally accessible web: Web accessibility and education. Assistive Technology, 31(4), 199–208. https://doi-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/10.1080/10400435.2017.1414086

Leffer, L. (2023, October 19). Your personal information is probably being used to train generative AI models. Scientific American.

Office of Educational Technology. (n.d.). Privacy resources. tech.ed.gov.