Sharing My Teaching Journal with My Students: Learning from Each Others' Reflections

Many teacher educators stress the need to prepare teachers who will be reflective. How do we accomplish this goal? A number of approaches have been described in the literature. A piece that influenced my particular project appeared in 1990. Ross (1990) summarized research showing that faculty members can model reflection by sharing their reasoning about teaching with their students, thereby illustrating the uncertainties and complexities of teaching (McDonald, 1992), and enabling students to see and, possibly, question the work of the teacher. This chapter discusses my students’ learning and my learning about my teaching as we shared reflections stimulated by my reflective journal. I describe my experiences with one approach to sharing my reasoning with the pre-service teachers in my course in an attempt to model and nurture my own and students’ reflections, and then move to describe how my teaching has changed since trying out this approach.

After a few years of teaching the initial course for students preparing to teach mathematics or a science at the secondary level, I had begun keeping a personal teaching journal. I used my journal to evaluate class sessions, to plan upcoming classes to ensure we returned to points that needed development or refinement, to note feedback that I wished to provide for individual students or the class as a whole, to explore my concerns about schooling practices that have shaped mine and my students’ assumptions related to equity issues, and, at times, to vent my frustrations with, or dislike of, particular students’ actions in order to understand both myself and my reactions as well as to speculate about possible reasons they acted as they did.