The Power of Reflecting on Your Teaching Practices 
 By Lorena Kavande Flores

Teaching is an art, learning to implement reflections on your teaching practices is a skill. 

     Reflection plays an important role in an effective teacher's instruction.  Taking time to reflect about  your own teaching practices and the students' process of learning results on fascinating discoveries.  It takes each one of us to raise awareness to improve our teaching skills.

     
     The school implemented one on one iPad use in 5th grade.  After attending multiple iPad and educational technology workshops, webinars and weekly chats through the twitter community, I take my learning in the shoes of a student, asking myself the question:  Will the use of this app impact student learning? If so, how?   

     The first great advantage visible as a teacher is the big heavy textbooks used in  past years is no longer on these tiny student's desks, it is all  in one app!  How wonderful!  Students have access to the pronunciation of words, phrases and videos, which at one time were in the forms of VHS or  DVD and could only be viewed in the class.
   
     What now?  I asked myself.  In order to make a plan to move forward, I had to move back to reflect on the findings of many apps I have download with one main objective, asking the same questions I ask when assigning homework:

• What is the learning objective when using this app ( completing this assignment)? 
• Is it an effective way to learn? 
• Is every student able to access the information to be an independent learner?  
• How will it impact their learning?
• Does it address different learning styles and readiness?    

     iPad assignment:  Using Explain Everything, students have the task to explain how to conjugate regular -ar verbs to a person who has never taken Spanish.  No guidelines, as to whether use your voice or not, provided by teacher.  After creating it, a reflection needs to be written to respond to the following question:

"How creating an Explain Everything has impacted my own learning?"

Some student responses include: "now.. I know what is like to be a teacher", "...by teaching it, I practice and was able to get it into my brain. It also helped my understanding of it."

 The power and reflection impacts our learning and our student's process of learning.

Please share your thoughts.