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ME.. On Becoming A Reflective Teacher

ME on Becoming A Reflective Teacher

I think this article is able to be relevant across decades because the matter it discusses is not solely about the kind of educator student teachers want to be, but also the kind of people we want to be. When reading this article, I often found myself trading out the word "teacher" for "person". The characteristics that Grant & Zeichner outline for being a reflective teacher are intertwined with characteristics for being a member of a society. 


Oh the irrelevance... 

The parts of the article which I highlighted in being more irrelevant/outdated were the paragraphs discussing the teacher education program. When discussing the program, Grant & Zeichner put an emphasis on the pressures student teachers would receive from professors to be a certain way, and hold specific views. They outlined "power relationships", and that our university professors will "emphasize, deemphasize and ignore difficult points of view". Maybe I am naive, maybe its too early in the program to say, and this may be unique to UBC's program, but so far I have found that the way in which UBC's teacher education program is formatted, the learning goals of each course do not align with Grant & Zeichner's perception of teacher education programs in 2020. 

Who am I?

Knowing that who I am as a person will effect who I am as an educator, and further who my students will be when they leave my classroom, I asked myself many questions reading this article:

  • Who am I? Who do I want to be? 
  • What kind of role model do I want my students to have? If my students could remember one lesson that they learned from me, what would it be?
  • What word do I want to come to my students minds when they think of me? 
After exploring these questions, the MANY answers that each of them hold, I realized I still needed to answer the second response question. However, I realized that I just did. In those moments, I was inquiring and critically thinking about myself as a teacher, and in turn, as a person. To me, it seems that teacher inquiry truly starts with personal inquiry. 


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  1. Susan GerofskySeptember 17, 2020 at 9:21 AM

    Wonderful ideas here, Sarah! I like the three questions you ask of yourself, and we might try these out in class discussions today as well. You have delved deeply into the personal rather than societal aspects of teacher reflection, but that is a good place to begin, as we can't control everything about society's views of education. I'm glad too to hear that your UBC Teacher Ed experience is off to a good, non-coercive start!!

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