Entrance Slip (Sept 21) - Grant & Zeichner: Becoming a Reflective Teacher

Grant and Zeichner's article spoke to me in some ways, but lost me in others. Although I am a teacher candidate in Vancouver in 2017, I found this article extremely relevant to what we are currently learning in most of our classes. A lot of what we have learned in classes is to be accepting of all student differences and in turn we should strive to use their life experiences to bring relevance to what they are learning. I feel this is truly valuable since it helps students make connections and build engagement in learning. I also related to the idea that it is difficult to come into a school environment with pre-existing norms and challenge them in support of being a reflective and open-minded teacher. Idealistically I would want to do this, but doing so as a teacher candidate or new teacher can make you vulnerable at such an early stage. However, I do feel like sometimes presenting alternative viewpoints to affect change is necessary. I feel like if no one were to ever challenge authority, things would never change. It always takes one person to challenge the status quo and change norms forever, but this can be a good thing, it leaves room for reflection, modification and a dynamic education system that adapts to changing times and a variety of views. I also agreed that it is easy to naturally adopt the beliefs and practices of the instructors you work closely with. I really related with this point because I remember as a young student I tended to follow the note style of each different teacher from class to class. This was a minor example, but I feel it could be true for teaching styles and reflective ability as well, it took time for me to realize this pattern and in turn develop my own style, which I was comfortable with and could integrate seamlessly into my learning.
My favourite part of the article was the story about Mary Smith because I feel like she gave a very concrete example of what an unreflective teacher would look like. Although she tried her best to teach her class, she never adapted her teaching methods or thought maybe their unwillingness to learn had to do with how she approached teaching them. I also didn't like how she blamed the students for not wanting to learn what she had to teach. Every student has the ability to enjoy learning and be engaged in what the teacher has to say, but it is up to the teacher to present an atmosphere and learning environment that can draw from the students interests to help keep them engaged. Growing up my aunt used to always say to me, "if plan A doesn't work, then there's plan B and if that doesn't work, there are 24 other letters in the alphabet and an infinite amount of numbers". Mary Smith had so many other ways she could have approached teaching, but she chose to remain inflexible. This taught me exactly what I do not want to do as a teacher. I also feel like being a reflective teacher is extremely import because if means that we are also being life long learners. If we can reflect and adapt our teaching methods, we are continuing to learn even as educators and we emulate what we want our students to achieve in their own lives. One thing that I disagreed with in the article however was, how they said reflective teaching was the only way and there was no alternative method. I felt that this was somewhat contradictory to what they were trying to convey in the first place. Rigid thinking like that is what caused unreflective teachers in the first place. There is always room for other alternatives or adaptions to what they feel is reflective teaching, that is how we can actually continue to be open-minded reflective teachers.