I am buying what George is selling and now I'm all excited to start blogging - and to try introducing it to my kids... I do think that honest reflection is super important and that it makes us better teachers which, in turn, benefits our students. I also think that teachers reflect even if they do not blog. Teaching is probably one of the most reflective professions out there. Think about it...we get to try a bunch of strategies for a whole year and then get to decide if we want to use those same strategies again the next year on a different set of students. Every time we teach a lesson, we automatically run through the whole thing again afterwards and make decisions on what worked and what didn't, and on how we would change it in the future (or scrap it in totality).
Having said that, the thing that excites me about blogging is to force myself to be even more reflective. Formalizing the process by putting pen to paper, or in this case, finger to key, means I can document my successes and failures and look them up later. Successes can be repeated and tweaked to perfection while failures can be learned from to make me a better teacher. Hopefully it will also help me be more organized.
Now if I can just figure out 'tags' and 'categories' I think I can make this work.
I agree with your comment about how blogging can make you more reflective. I have always found writing down my thoughts makes things a little bit more clear for me and it also makes me thinks of solutions to problems and really focus on what worked and what didn't.
ReplyDeleteI agree blogging will make you be more reflective. I also like how instead of just looking into blogs and talking about them we need to create our own throughout the course which really has us practice and create a habit that we can use in our own classrooms.
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