Reflection Blog

At first the blogging seemed to be a hassle and took a lot of time.  It is difficult to get all the necessary hours in while still completing my teaching responsibilities.  Fortunately, I have very good administrators that encourage us to pursue further professional development.  But as the semester progressed, the blogs actually forced me to take a moment and step back from the experience to reflect.  I found this process helpful in processing what was working and what needed to change.  I’m not sure I would have reflected until the semester ended if we had not completed the blogs.  I can appreciate the usefulness of the reflection now because it gave me a chance to change my perspective midstream rather than waiting until the practicum was over. 

The blogging process was more helpful that traditional journaling because of the public nature of the blog.  Journaling would have helped me reflect on the experience, but it would not have included the feedback from my peers.  Practicum can feel overwhelming.  When I post my perspective on my experience and then read the experiences of others, it is helpful to see the commonalities in my classmates’ experiences.  The feedback of others is encouraging and also provided me with insights that I could take back and apply to my own practicum experience. 

The blogging experience was challenging to me because of the time involved.  I was very concerned with completing my hours, and especially my direct hours.  I knew these hours had to be completed during the school day and my blog did not.  For this reason, a few times I let my blog slide longer than I should have.  I also preferred blogging assignments that gave us specific prompts.  There is so much going on in the practicum experience that it is difficult to think of something to blog about and when I did, I often felt like I was repeating myself.  The specific blog prompts also helped me focus on things that I should be paying attention to, but might have missed without the prompt.  I would suggest that in the future, all blog assignments are specific prompts that guide the thinking of students and provide a guide for what students should be looking out for during the practicum experience.