J: Journals of a Reflective Practitioner (WR)

My Journals – the reflective practitioner

I worked in a Middle School with sixth graders and their teachers from the Spring semester of my junior year in college through my student teaching semester in the Spring of my senior year. My supervising professor required that I keep a journal of my activities and thoughts about what I was learning during the time I worked for him. I enjoyed writing about what was going on. It only seemed natural to continue the concept of keeping journals about teaching when I started working as a real teacher.

The term that described what I was doing is “reflective practitioning”. I was reflecting about what I was doing in the classroom and at times even having dialogues with myself, in writing, to work out feelings and ideas that I pondered.

I discovered after my first year teaching, that I was spending a large chunk of my writing focused on the interactions of teachers. I decided that at that point that I would refocus my writings on kids and curriculum. I started each journal the day before the first day of classes and wrote about my goals, expectations, and anxieties about the upcoming year. There was no regular schedule for me to write. I just wrote when I felt like it. I focussed on my feelings about what I was doing. Occasionally I would name a student or students in the journal as it pertained to what I was doing and feeling. After the last day of classes in June, I would re-read the entire journal before writing down the final entry, evaluating how I thought the year went and giving some thought as to where I wanted to go for the following year.

I digitized all of my handwritten journals once computers became the norm for my writing and have notebooks that cover all of the 33 years that I taught, before retiring.

I keep all of the .pdf versions of the journals on my iDevices so I can read them and share them with others when it seems appropriate. Re-reading the journals I get to see my growth as a teacher. The ideals that I had, the problems I faced and how occasionally I even solved them. My old journals have helped new teachers when I’ve shared with them, showing the new teachers that even us experienced teachers went through the same issues that they are going through now, even though the times and curriculums were different. And we survived.

Even though I still teach as a substitute teacher and as an educational technology consultant, I no longer write my journals focussing on education. I leave all of my reflective practitioning and other writings on my blog. I’ve decided to keep a printed version of all of those writings also. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll take the next step and publish some of them.