Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (FIRST)
ORCID IDs
Date of this Version
2018
Document Type
Portfolio
Citation
Buchheister, Kelley. "CYAF374: Purposeful Planning—Reflection and Practice in Enriching Students’ Lesson Design" (2018). UNL Faculty Portfolios. 116. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/prtunl/116
Abstract
This portfolio documents my process of embracing, modeling, and implementing reflective teaching practices to enhance the lesson designs of my prospective early childhood professionals in CYAF374: Curriculum Planning in Early Childhood. Throughout this project I attended to and applied five critical components emphasized in the peer review of teaching project and integrated these ideas within the foundational elements of Japanese lesson study in order to implement instructional practices that would benefit my students. These five elements are extensively discussed throughout the portfolio on multiple levels: (a) understanding the role of reflective practice, (b) identifying goals through backward design, (c) outlining practices that provide opportunities to achieve the goals, (d) planning and implementing tasks and activities, and (e) R^3—review, reflect, and revise on the implemented activities. Analysis of the data generated from this project provides additional insight into the benefits of explicitly teaching and integrating these strategies for reflective practice into teacher education programs as well as revealing implications for enriching instruction at the college level. Continued systematic investigations of this process is critical in future semesters as well as explorations into applying these features within the context of higher education.