Reflections on Growth as a Teacher

In the past couple months, I feel like I’ve really started to grow as a teacher because I’ve had many opportunities to put my skills into practice and to make discoveries about new teaching tools and methods. What helped me develop as a teacher were the many hands on assignments that I completed this semester, as well as the work I’ve completed online and on my portfolio. Being able to describe my growth in relation to the 12 MELS Professional Competencies in one place has been really helpful in assessing my growth and figuring out where I want to go from here.

Before, I was learning a lot about the field of teaching from my professors, but now I’ve found a new way to connect with people and subsequently learn from them, through the online world. Now, I’m constantly learning from other students, my professors, the professionals and people I meet at McGill events, educators I meet at substitution jobs, and teachers I’ve volunteered with. Online networks can help me stay in touch with these people and discover more about what they have to offer to me, as a teacher in training. The creation of our online portfolios has also given me the opportunity to access my colleagues’ portfolios and learn from their blogs. For example, I’ve taken note of a lot of teaching resources that I probably wouldn’t have found on my own. In having access to a bunch of novice teachers’ blogs, I can gain knowledge about all kinds of resources that they’re discovering.

At the beginning of this semester, I drew a concept map about who I am. I now have the chance to look back at what I drew, after developing some very important Professional Competencies over these past few months. I may not have noticed when I was developing specific competencies, but when I reflect upon everything I’ve done, I realize just how much I’ve been growing in relation to those Competencies. The concept map that I drew described my culture, values, hobbies, goals, past education and employment. Looking at it now, I think it’s still pretty accurate because I haven’t made drastic changes, but I would like to add some aspects about what I’ve been learning recently. In the goals section, I would modify it to be make it more specific to education because there’s still a lot of things I want to accomplish. For example, I want to keep developing my bank of online teaching resources, and I want to ensure that inclusion is one of my top priorities in the classroom. I would add inclusion into my values section because UDL and past work has really emphasized this as a key way to approach education.

One of the areas in which I definitely think I’ve grown a lot is my use and knowledge of technology in the classroom. The more I know about technology, the more my students will benefit, since they will be exposed to engaging and interesting technologies. Of course, I still have skills to develop in this area, which I think will happen once I’m out on my field experiences, actually interacting with and applying different technologies. I still have to develop my professional network and work on my online identity, which I can do by using the different social tools at my disposal (twitter, Facebook, etc.). I think technology is changing the way I teach because I’ve realized that it can be a big help in second language classroom, which is very important to me as PIF major. If technology is changing the way I teach, then it is most definitely going to change the way my students learn. When I started to use technology to learn in high school, it was a huge change in my life that I will always be grateful for because it enhanced my learning and provided me with more resources. Therefore, I think students will benefit from an increased presence of technology in the classroom, either by blogging about their interests, completing online educational games, watching videos, etc. One of the ways in which technology has improved my learning experiences has been through the use of Google Drive, which makes it so much easier to collaborate with others on group projects. This semester, I had many group projects that were made easier with Google Drive. Last semester, I though this platform was going to be hard to figure out, but once I created my account and started using it, I realized how simple it is and how helpful it really is. I know that as I continue learning, I’ll discover more tools like this one, as long as I remain open to trying them, which I definitely think I’ve improved at.