Meaningful Teaching Reflection

Meaningful Teaching Reflection

Reflecting on your teaching is a good practice and helps you grow as an instructor. It can be one of the most important sources of personal professional development that leads to improvement. Teaching relfection allows instructors to innovate approaches for maximum success and helps you to understand your students’ abilities and needs.

Self Evaluation

Self evaluation is the thoughtful process of monitoring the effect your teaching has had on student learning. This can be done by journalling or taking notes. By evaluating yourself, you can see areas you would like to improve. Reflection helps you to make progress.

Formative Evaluation

Formative self evaluation can be done while your working through the course to make improvements as you go.

Summative Evaluation

Summative self evaluation is when you make judgments about the efficacy of a course at the very end to make adjustments or improvements for the next semester.

Incorporate What You Learn

Reflecting on your teaching will help you to understand how your students best learn and will allow you to be accountable for their progress. By assessing the strengths and weaknesses in your own teaching, you will develop an awareness of the factors that control and prevent learning, so you can make adjustments.

Trying out new methods or approaches in the classroom can create new learning opportunities. These changes can be as simple as varying a small activity or as adventurous as changing your whole approach or plan.

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Professional Development

Professional development (PD) is any type of continuing education or training that aims to enhance your teaching skills and improves student learning outcomes. PD can take many forms including online seminars, conferences and workshops.

Opportunities for PD provided by Teaching & Learning include:

Events (ie. Celebration of Teaching & Learning)
Presentations (ie. InCITE Series, PD Queue)
Learning Modules

Common Questions

Self Evaluation is a solo process, so how will I know I’ve improved?

You can draw conclusions from overall success of your students, but you can also ask for student feedback. You can also ask a colleague to observe and give feedback.

Is there a fee to attend professional development events on campus?

Most professional development events held on campus at Medicine Hat College do not require a registration fee to attend.

Further Resources

University of Waterloo – Tools for Reflecting on Your Teaching