A Teaching Year In Review: An Invitation

As I make my way to the top  of the veritable Everest-sized mountain of grading that marks the end of the semester, I am taking some time to reflect on my year in teaching. Every year, around this time, I do a personal annual review of sorts, taking stock of how the year went.  I ask two basic questions – What went well? And what didn’t? – which I then use to review every area of my life, from work to health to spirituality and everything in between (my process was inspired by author Chris Guillebeau, and if you’re interested, check out his writings on the subject). As part of this process, I thought I would do a teaching year in review, and offer this exercise for the other educators out there who may also find themselves coming up for air after a busy few months (or busy year!).

As educators for peace and nonviolence, self-reflection is one of the key skills we seek to help our students cultivate, and is a skill we need ourselves to become effective in our teaching practice.  Self-reflection is a core skill for cultivating a peaceful and nonviolent world, and for helping us to reach our highest potential as human beings, which are intimately related and which I believe should ultimately be the purpose of education. In the midst of a busy semester, between the prepping and grading and actual teaching, there is often very little time for us, as teachers, to sit down and reflect on our own teaching practice. Regardless of what age, level, or setting in which you teach, there are various constraints and competing needs that allow for little time for our own self-reflection during the year.

So here we are, between semesters, many of us on break, at the end of the calendar year, with darkened days, colder nights – a perfect time to look inward, take stock, and plan for the future. The distance brought on by winter break  helps things settle into focus:  the celebrations, the challenges, the opportunities for growth.

So I invite you, dear teachers, to join me in a Teaching Year in Review. The process is simple. Here’s how I did mine:

1. Gratitude – I started from a place of deep appreciation for the abundant opportunities I had this year to teach about things that I love. I acknowledge the deep sense of gratitude I feel for being able to do this work, that I find meaningful and that brings me great joy.
2. Inventory – What did I teach this year? Where? I take stock of all of the opportunities, from teaching yoga classes to college classes to online courses and conference presentations.
3. What went well? What were the highs? This is an opportunity to celebrate of the joys of the year and take time to assess what went really well. The next step here would be to ask: How can I do more of this/make more of it happen?
4. What didn’t go so well? What do I want to improve? What areas provide me with opportunities for growth?  If we look deeply, each of us can probably think of conversations that didn’t go as well as we’d wished, lost opportunities for “teachable moments,” or activities that backfired. The point of this isn’t to beat ourselves up, but rather just to reflect so that next time around, we can learn from our mistakes or challenges and use these as opportunities for personal and professional growth in the coming year.
5. Goals for 2015: After assessing #1-4, what are my goals for 2015? In terms of the inventory, am I teaching the right amount and in the right places? Should I be teaching more or less (or just right)? In terms of what went well, can I do more of this? Is there anything I should change? In terms of what didn’t go well, how can I improve? What do I need to learn? What can I learn from some of those challenging moments so that the next time they come around, I’m better prepared?

I’ll spare you the details of my whole process (though if you’re interested, feel free to send me an email!), but will share two of my own goals with you for next year as examples:

• Learn new, meaningful ways to teach about gender: This topic has been a recurring challenge the past two years, and I’m finding I need to do some professional development in this area so that I can teach about it in a transformative way.
• Experimenting with assessment: This connects to a greater personal goal of creating a balanced life (ever a work in progress :).  I put a lot of thought into the assignments I give students, and feel that the workload I assign them is reasonable and also helps me to get my finger on the pulse of what they are learning and struggling with. It seems manageable for them, but not always manageable for me, hence the Everest pile I mentioned at the beginning of the post piles up all semester (I try to keep pace with it, but inevitably at the end I’m buried). I would like to find meaningful ways of assessing my students – meaningful to me and meaningful to them – that also help me to work towards greater balance.

In the end, my reflection process really helped me to bring the year into focus, gave me lots of food for thought between semesters, and helped me start brainstorming ideas for the coming year. That said, part of my reflection process is also going to be taking some time to NOT think about this, as I head to the hills to meditate for New Year’s (which  also helps me to be the best peace educator I can be :).

What are your teaching & learning goals for 2015?  If you do your own Teaching Year In Review, let us know how it goes or how YOU reflect on your year in teaching in the comments below!

Also feel free to email Stephanie Knox Cubbon at education@mettacenter.org