Documentation

HD 450: Reflective Teaching

Dewi Ochoa
March 24, 2016

Documentation: HD 450: Reflective Teaching

This class was one of the classes I was truly interested in. As a teacher in constructivist
school I value observation and reflection as a tool to create curriculum. This class was not
however in my list of possible classes for my specialization. I was able to substitute it and was
allowed to take it as an elective. A primary goal for me in this class was to create opportunities
to reflect in the way I conduct my class, this course allowed me to reflect on my own pedagogy.
It was interesting to adapt the learning in class to a preschool classroom. Luis Giraldo was the
professor for this class and I was delighted to get him and have a sense of what the old school
Pacific Oaks was like. He adapted the syllabus to create a curriculum that included more social
justice and it changed the way that I saw reflection as a part of teaching.
I learned a lot from reading the material. The book I was assigned to read was The Art of
Critical Pedagogy, I feel this book was one of the most important readings I have done through
my education, it allowed me to see critical pedagogy in action in a more current setting, it made
it seem manageable like I would be able to attain it in my own work with children and families. I
learned a lot about involving the children in creating their own goals and plans to obtain them.
The stories in the book made the theory manageable and easier to understand.
It was important for me being a reflective teaching in a broader sense of the word. I
learned more about reflecting not just on the day to day work in the classroom but also reflecting
on our own life and transforming to become a reflective person. I valued reflecting on how my
personal experiences would affect my interactions with families. There was definitely interesting
discussions that started from sharing personal experiences and reflecting with others. There were
hot topics that came when we discussed race and cultures.

The visual materials were catalyst for deep interesting discussions about the deeper issues
in education, in personal lives of teachers and students and our role as educators to support
families. I especially remember the discussions we had about children and physical discipline, it
was an interesting conversation that raised a lot of feelings, we had a strong conversation about
the value of discipline but cautiously discussing using physical punishment. I feel like my
contribution was in this conversation was to think about other ways to look at discipline. We had
just discussed what a teachers role is in discipline and what our personal beliefs are about
physical punishment and how we can help parents in these situations. It was a hard topic to talk
about, a lot of it relates to our cultural backgrounds and reflects all kinds of things about who we
are as far as socio economic status, race, culture, etc. It was eye opening to start thinking about
how even the way we were disciplined could have a background from our race, something that
we might not even think about. These conversations along with the videos that we watched
helped me to see more about who I am as a person and as a teacher.
This class helped me in patience. There were discussions that felt like it was redundant
with certain students, so I had to be patient. I definitely learned that I can be triggered by certain
comments and that I am capable of controlling my temper, with some people theres no
reasoning but one can try. I enjoyed the challenge of working with a group of students who are
not educators, it was a challenge to listen to them disregard the value of teaching and blatantly
talk about how they didnt care about the reading or the learning from the class. I hope that as the
class ended they would have a better understanding of what it takes to be a reflective teacher and
hopefully have a different respect for educators.